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BELIEF IN GOD: 



AN EXAMINATION OF SOME FUNDAMENTAL 
THEIST1C PROBLEMS. 



M. J. SAVAGE. 



TO WHICH IS ADDED AN ADDRESS ON 

THE INTELLECTUAL BASIS OF FAITH 

BY 

W. H. SAVAGE. 



SECOND EDITION. 



BOSTON: 

GEORGE H. ELLIS, 141 FRANKLIN STREET. 

1881. 



.Sn 



Copyright, 

1881, 

By GEORGE H. ELLIS. 

Transfer 
Engineers School LI by. 
June 29,1931 



©etucattotn 

Believing that the true way of escape from the "Slough of Despond" 

is by going straight through it to the other side, like "Christian," 

and not by crawling back to the starting point, abject 

and mud-spattered, like " Pliable," the 

author dedicates this book 

TO 

THOSE WHO AGREE WITH HIM IH THIS OPIHIOH. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

I. Preface n 

II. Origin and Development of the Idea of God 13 

III. Does God Exist? 30 

IV. Can We Know God? ....... 47 

V. Is God Conscious, Personal, and Good ? ... 65 

VI. Why Does not God Reveal Himself? ... 82 

VII. Shall We Worship God? 99 

VIII. Shall We Pray to God? ...... 118 

IX. The Glory and the Shame of Atheism . . .137 



X. The Intellectual Basis of Faith. By W. H. Savage 153 



PREFACE. 



If a book does not commend itself by meeting a want and 
accomplishing a work, there is little use in an explanatory pref- 
ace as a defence against either the public or the critics. In the 
present state of the public mind on the subject of Theism, no 
apology for speaking is required from him who honestly thinks he 
has anything to say. Whether the speaking has been to any 
useful purpose, the audience itself must decide. The author 
ventures to believe, however, that, both as to method and result, 
he has something to offer that is not merely an echo of what has 
already been said. Believing "the scientific method" the only 
one by which truth is to be attained, the attempt has been made 
to avoid all assumption. And if all the following positions can- 
not be scientifically demonstrated, it is believed that, at any rate, 
nothing is yet known that can contradict them. The term, scien- 
tific method, is of course used in its broadest sense, as including 
the observation, orderly arrangement, and verification of all known 
truth. No one has the right to narrow it down to anything less 
inclusive. 

The following eight chapters are only eight Sunday morning 
discourses, delivered in the regular order of the author's work. 
But, judging by their reception as thus given, he dares to hope 
they may be of use to some beyond the limits of his usual con- 
gregation. It is perhaps proper to say that, with two exceptions, 
they have never been written, but are published from the stenog- 
rapher's reports. 

The author takes the liberty of calling special attention to the 
address by his brother. He believes its method to be new, its 
treatment fresh, and its argument unanswerable. 

Boston, Feb. 23, 1881. 



WHERE IS GOD? 

" Oh, where is the sea ? " the fishes cried, 

As they swam the crystal clearness through ; 
" We've heard from of old of the ocean's tide, 
And we long to look on the waters blue. 
The wise ones speak of an infinite sea : 
Oh, who can tell us if such there be ? " 

The lark flew up in the morning bright, 
And sung and balanced on sunny wings ; 

And this was its song : — "I see the light, 
I look on a world of beautiful things ; 

But, flying and singing everywhere, 

In vain I have searched to find the air." 



Origin and Development of the Idea of God. 



There was a time in the infantile life of Shakespeare 
before a conscious thought had passed through his brain. 
There was also a time when he waked up to this wonderful 
thing that we call consciousness, though as yet he was a 
child and thought as a child. His ideas were crude and 
illogical, and to a grown-up man foundationless and foolish. 
His utterance was stammering, or meaningless prattle. But 
there came a time when this same Shakespeare's brain blos- 
somed out into the white lily of a Cordelia, and bloomed 
into the blood-red horror of Lady Macbeth. What is true 
of an individual is, in a parallel sense, true of a race. 
There was a time before the human race had ever thought 
of that which to-day fills the universe and absorbs the 
profound attention of man. There was again a time when 
this human race, in some crude, childish, stammering, 
prattling way, first began to think God and try to say 
God, to give utterance, expression, to this new and mag- 
nificent idea, — this idea which in the later ages has blos- 
somed out into the magnificence, the grandeur, the purity, 
the self-sacrifice of such men as Buddha and Jesus. What 
we want to do at the outset is, if we can, to get back to the 



14 God. 

birth-time, or as near to it as possible, of this first human 
thought of God. 

Modern knowledge, within the last fifty years, for the first 
time in the history of the race, has kindled a light at which 
we may set on fire our torch; and, with this torch in our 
hand, we may trace back the path of human progress along 
and down toward the primeval twilight before the sun was 
up ; even beyond the twilight into the darkness of the yet 
sunless night where only a few stars even cast their pale and 
trembling rays. With our torch, we may go down and back 
into the crypts and caverns whence sprung the fountains of 
this great river of human life, whose waves have been the 
rise and fall of empires, and whose frothy, foaming crests 
have been dynasties ; between and beneath which has flowed, 
ia dark and sullen strength, all the common life of the race. 
With this torch in hand, then, this morning, let us go back 
and catch a glimpse, if we can, of the earliest form of human 
worship. What will it be like ? 

A father or chief of a tribe has died. After long waiting 
to see if this departed life is not to return and take posses- 
sion of the body again, they have done what they can to 
protect this body from decay. For they said, in accordance 
with reasons which I shall very soon give you, " Perhaps he 
has only gone away for a little while. He may come again 
to-morrow or next week or next month, and want the body 
again. We will keep it, if we can." But, having become 
tired with waiting, they have buried the body, — preserved as 
well as possible, — away out of sight ; they have built over 
it a mound, a tumulus, a grave ; and on this grave they have 
kindled a fire to guide the departed spirit in the night and 
on its journey. They bring here and place upon this grave — • 
the first altar — food, offerings of food, for the dead. They 
bring flowers, they bring tobacco, weapons, whatever they 



Origin and Development of the Idea. 15 

conceive the departed chieftain cares for, whatever he loved 
in his life. And here, — mark } t ou, the origin of human sac- 
rifice, — if he was a bloody, powerful chief, thirsting for the 
lives of his enemies, slaughtering during that life as many as 
possible, they bring to the grave the captured members of 
the clans that were his old-time enemies, and put them to 
death at his tomb, as being the sweetest offering they can 
bring him, that which will bestow upon him the highest 
degree of satisfaction. And then some appointed orator of 
the family or the tribe stands up, and in the noblest lan- 
guage he can command rehearses the characteristics and the 
grand deeds of the dead \ or, forming in procession, they 
march around the grave, chanting in rude but rhythmic 
utterances verses of eulogy for the departed. Here is the 
first hymn of worship that the human race ever sang. Here, 
then, is a picture in brief outline, yet clear enough, I think, 
to be distinctly understood, of the earliest form of worship 
known to man, — the worship of the father or the chief of a 
tribe. 

But now, as we look upon this scene, there springs up and 
looks us in the face the fundamental problem of all : How 
did it happen that these people supposed that this chief was 
not extinct ? He speaks no more, he no longer moves hand 
or foot, no longer exhibits emotion or passion, no longer 
cares for food or drink, no longer opens his eyes. How does 
it happen that they believe then that he is not dead, that he 
lives somewhere and cares for something still ? You must 
not be surprised if the reasons that I offer you for the birth of 
this belief seem to you somewhat slight and trivial. You 
must rather divest your minds of the results of ages of study 
and thought and culture so far as you may, and get back to 
the utter, perfect simplicity of children, ignorant of all the 
laws of the world. And then you will have to be able to un- 



1 6 God. 

derstand the processes of their reasoning. For according to 
the light they had, according to the experiences through 
which they had passed, they reasoned as logically and as well 
as we can to-day. What do we find ? Why, here is one of 
these men walking along in the sunshine, and he sees his 
shadow by his side upon the ground, and he says, What is this ? 
He knows nothing of what is so commonplace and familiar 
to us to-day, the law of the shining of light that compels 
any opaque substance to cast a shadow. He knows nothing 
of all this. He does not look up into the heavens ; and, 
when a cloud passes over the sun and the shadow disappears, 
he simply wonders where it has gone. He looks over into 
the water, and there is his reflection in the stream or lake or 
pond; and he wonders what this other self means. When 
he goes away, that also goes away. It puzzles him. He tries 
to explain it ; and the explanation that he gives is that this is 
a shadowy duplicate of himself, that is alive as he is, that is 
capable of coming and going at will as he comes and goes. 
And this is the most rational explanation that he can make. 
And this belief has been transmitted down the ages, and re- 
mains a part of the popular myth and story of the world. 
Perhaps you will remember the story of Peter Schlemil, who 
permanently lost his shadow, so that he wandered through 
the world all the rest of his life with this spiritual, second 
self detached and gone. This shows how this belief in- 
grained itself in the thought of man. 

Then another thing helped him to believe in this duplicate 
spiritual self. He laid down and fell asleep ; he knew noth- 
ing about the origin or philosophy of dreams : indeed, we 
know very little about them, even to-day. But, while he is 
lying here asleep, he is off on a journey; he hunts, he fights, 
he converses with his friends ; and, strangest of all, he meets 
there and talks face to face with the shadows of those that 



Origin and Development of the Idea. 17 

have long been dead. And this, to his thinking, is just as 
real an experience as any that he has when he is wide-awake. 
He sees there in his dream the shadowy dog, the shadowy 
antelope, the shadowy horse, the shadowy bear, the shadowy 
weapon, the shadowy kitchen utensil of his camp ; and he 
believes that there is another world than this that he sees 
with his eyes open, — there is a shadowy world, a duplicate 
of this. And by and by, when he wakes up, he finds him- 
self lying just where he fell asleep. And his interpretation 
— a natural and logical one on the basis of all he knew — 
was that this shadowy self which had been out on an excur- 
sion, hunting or fighting or visiting friends, had come back 
again ; and, when it came back and entered into the body, 
the body awoke, and he sees now the world from which he 
started. 

We carry still in our common, every-day speech the traces 
of this old belief. Suppose one of your number should faint 
this morning and be carried out into the vestibule. You 
watch over her, you sprinkle her forehead with water, you 
chafe her hands, and look for signs of returning conscious- 
ness • and, when she opens her eyes, you say, " She is coming 
to." Finish the sentence, and you have the belief of the 
ancient world, — " She is coming to herself again." The 
spirit has been away, and the body was unconscious. The 
spirit returns, and the body rouses itself. 

Here, then, is the origin of this primeval faith of man, of 
the universal belief in the continued existence of the life after 
death. For they reasoned — and they reasoned well, when 
they said — the spirit of the body of the man that was asleep 
stayed away a little while and came back. Another was in 
a trance, or in some combat he was smitten with a blow 
upon the head that made him unconscious, perhaps for hours 
or days. The spirit is away all this while. It comes back 



1 8 God. 

again after a long time. It is able, then, to live without the 
body, one day, two days, a week. Why not forever ? It per- 
haps will come back after a thousand years, and take the old 
body again. In this way, and as naturally as ever sprung a 
grass-blade out of the earth, grew up the belief in this other 
duplicate world. 

And then this connected itself again quite as naturally 
with the early beliefs in regard to the place where the dead 
lived, the location of this other world. Tribes, from one 
cause or another, migrated from their old homes. They 
were at the mouth of a river, and they wandered up its banks 
and made them a new home ; or they were driven across 
a mountain chain ; or they lived, to escape cold and wild 
beasts, in caves and dens, and then, growing stronger, dared 
to come out into the sunlight and make themselves a place 
of abode beneath the blue skies. What more natural than 
for them to do precisely what we are doing all the time, — 
idealize our old homes, idealize the past, make it more beau- 
tiful than the present, forget all the ills that we suffered 
then, remember all the ills that we suffer now, and so create 
a contrast between the golden past and the iron age of to- 
day. This followed, and out of this soil blossomed their 
dreams of Edens and golden ages and beautiful homes in 
the past. And they believed that the dead spirit did what 
was the most natural thing in the world, — went back to the old 
home. You will find, for example, tribes to-day who have 
migrated up some river-bottom, who, when they bury their 
dead, put them in a boat, and set them afloat on the stream, 
that they may go back home. We find that they believed 
that they returned to this resting-place of their race, over the 
mountains, or back into the caves. And out of these caves, 
the primeval homes of men, have been developed the beliefs 
in the underground Hebrew Sheol, the Greek and Roman 



Origin and Development of the Idea. 19 

Hades, the Underworld of the nations. Or, as they saw far off 
toward the sunset and over the sea cloud islands, glimpses 
of what seemed to them supernatural and beautiful lands, 
there sprung up in their minds a belief that the dead had 
gone toward the sunset, as Hiawatha did, floating along that 
stream of light adown the west, seeking for the " Islands of 
the Blest." Thus out of these perfectly natural human expe- 
riences sprung these phases of human belief which, in some 
form or another, have existed until to-day and have domi- 
nated the world. 

The first worship, then, I have said, was the worship of 
ancestors, the worship of the dead fathers of the tribe. And 
you will see very easily that these gods would become good 
or bad, great or small, according to the characteristics which 
they displayed during their earthly career. And, after they 
were dead, they became the kings of the underworld, where 
they waited to receive the followers and members of the 
tribe. 

Out of this belief in ancestor worship sprung, first, fetich- 
ism. What is fetichism ? It is the worship of a stick or 
stone or tree or any inanimate thing. How did it happen 
that men ever became so irrational as this ? You must not 
attribute to them so little reason or sense as to suppose 
they really worshipped a stick or a stone. Some accidental 
connection sprung up that led them to attribute to this tree 
or to this stone or to this stick a piece of good luck or a 
piece of bad luck. And they believed, as I have already 
intimated to you, that the stick and the stone and the tree 
and the mountain and the horse and the dog all had a sec- 
ond, duplicate, spiritual self. They believed that these were 
repositories and sources of mysterious power. Or they be- 
lieved that they might even be the temporary abodes of their 
own dead ancestors and friends. For it was a part of this 



20 God. 

belief that the spirit could go out and come back ; and that 
any other spirit could also enter in while the first was out, 
and take possession, as a man might enter an empty house. 
Thus even more than one might make it their common 
abode. We find Mary Magdalen in the New Testament 
represented as a home where seven devils abode at once. 
And another had so many that he called his name legion, 
for he said we are a great number living here together. 
They then would come to worship this stick or stone or 
weapon so accidentally linked with a piece of good or bad 
fortune; in the one case praising it for the good, in the 
other attempting to please and placate it, to ward off 
the bad. 

Then the next step in the development of gods was the 
worship of animals, of mountains, rivers, trees, stars, the 
sun and the moon. How did this come about ? By a double 
process. In the first place, as I have already explained in 
regard to fetich worship, they believed that these had a 
spiritual duplicate self. And a like belief existed clear down 
to the time of the great astronomer Kepler, just a little 
while before Newton; for Kepler himself believed that 
every star had a ruling spirit which controlled its movements. 
That was the most rational method he could then devise 
to explain the regularity of their journeying through the 
heavens. And the other process by which this came about 
was this : You know it is common even to-day, and it always 
has been, for prominent men in barbarous tribes to take 
some curious or symbolical name. We find, for example, at 
the West, Sitting Bull, for one of our Indian chiefs. We 
have Black Hawk, we have The Great Crow, we have The 
Eagle ; we have those who take as a name the tortoise or the 
hare or the beaver. After a time, the people would forget 
that this was a symbolical name of a man. And, being 



Origin and Development of the Idea. 21 

accustomed to say that a beaver or the sun or a star or a 
mountain was the ancestor of their tribe, the worship of sun 
or star or moon or mountain itself would spring up as nat- 
urally as a seed grows from the ground where it is planted. 

And then this, of course, would lead us naturally to the 
next step, to the development of polytheism, the worship of 
a multitude of gods, good, bad, and indifferent, high and low, 
great and small, all over the world. There are to-day in 
India alone thousands of gods worshipped by the common 
people ; thousands in China. There were hundreds in the 
Pantheon of Rome. The whole universe, by this terrific 
imagination of the early mind, was peopled with figures and 
spirits, grand or grotesque, hateful or kindly, possessed of all 
the different characteristics that they discovered in their own 
multifarious life. 

And then what followed next ? Two forces as natural as 
the dawn were at work in the midst of these multitudinous 
gods of polytheism. One was the power of natural selection 
by which some of the gods were lifted up into greatness, and 
others were cast down to a lower rank, or even into obscurity 
and forgetfulness. You can see how natural it would be. 
Egypt becomes a great country, of which her neighbor nations 
are afraid. Of course, then, the gods of Egypt are mightier 
than the gods of the petty tribes about her. Babylon spreads 
her wings all over the East. Her gods are as grand in their 
majesty as are her kings upon earth. And so there would 
naturally spring up, as there sprung up great kings and great 
despots, great gods; while others would become small and 
feeble. By this process, Jupiter became the king of all the 
Olympians. And so among the Hindoos, they had there one 
who was first and supreme. And so in China, so all over 
the world where this progress of thought went on. 

And, along with this process of dividing the gods into two 



22 God. 

ranks as great and small, there went on another process of 
dividing them according to character, as good or bad, as 
friendly or hostile. But they worshipped both just the same. 
For you can very easily see that, if we really believe that there 
is a power outside of us who can harm us, we shall try to 
keep on the right side of him, if he is malignant, just as 
earnestly as we shall try to please and rejoice in him, if he is 
kind. And this process of thought has not died out yet. I 
have had occasion to tell you of an intelligent lady in Boston 
with whom I have talked within the last two years, who said 
to me : " I would like above all things to believe as you do, 
but I do not dare to. I do not know but there may be a god 
in the heavens like him of whom I have been taught ; and, if 
there is, I am afraid of him." Only a little while ago a 
Christian mother in England was found teaching her child to 
bow whenever the Devil's name was mentioned ■ and as she 
explained it to the woman who asked her about it — "Be- 
cause I think it is safer," "Give the Devil his due." Keep 
on the right side of any power that may help or hinder. 
Thus I say this process went on dividing the gods into good 
and bad. 

Another process, very curious and yet that you will see is 
very natural, was going on at the same time. A great nation 
conquers some other nation, gets it under its feet. The 
gods of the conquered nation are supposed also to be con- 
quered and partake of the degradation of the conquest; so 
they are relegated to a lower sphere. When Zoroaster taught 
his new religion and converted hundreds and thousands of 
the people to his new faith, the gods of the Hindoos, the 
religion that was conquered and driven out, became the ma- 
lignant sprites and devils of the Parsis. And this has left 
its imprint in our very language ; for, did you know it, the 
word "deity" is derived from the old Hindoo word "deva," 



Origin and Development of the Idea. 23 

and the word " devil" is derived from the same. Deity and 
devil originally were one, divided at last by the process and de- 
velopment of human thought that made one class of forces and 
powers good and another evil. And so we find all through 
the nations of the past that they have worshipped every 
force and power of nature. They worship the bright sky, and 
they worship the storm-cloud. They worship the sun as a 
life-giving, beneficent power; they worship the sun as the 
scorching, burning flame of Moloch, the blasting breath that 
makes the deserts and withers the crops. Thus, in their wor- 
ship, they had two classes of gods, light and dark, good and 
evil, hateful and helpful in their natures. 

What is the next step beyond polytheism ? For these gods 
could not live and multiply themselves to human thought 
forever. It is what Professor Max Miiller calls by a word 
that may be unfamiliar to you, henotheism. The next step 
beyond polytheism is not monotheism, it is henotheism. 
What is that ? It is worship on the part of some people of 
one god exclusively, but without the accompanying denial 
of the real existence of other gods. To illustrate what I 
mean take the case of the ancient Hebrews. We are ac- 
customed to speak of them as monotheists. They were not 
monotheists, they were henotheists. They believed that they 
ought to worship Jehovah, their god ; but it never entered 
the heads of the common people to deny or even doubt the 
existence of Dagon, the god of the Philistines, or the gods 
of the Egyptians, or the gods of Tyre and Sidon, or the gods 
of the Moabites. They believed they existed, believed they 
were real gods : only Jehovah was their God, and they must 
worship him and him alone. You will find traces of this 
all along in Hebrew thought. Recall, for example, such 
a familiar phrase as "King of kings and Lord of lords." 
Jehovah, then, was not the only god. He was the only god 



24 God. 

of the Hebrews ; but he was also " a great King of all the 
gods." These "all the gods" lived: only Jehovah was the 
great king over them, mightier than they, subduing them to 
his power, just as David subdued the petty kings that were 
his neighbors. 

The next step beyond henotheism was monotheism, — the 
belief not only that men should exclusively worship one 
god, but that there was no other god to worship. This 
was one of the grandest steps that the religious life of man 
has ever taken ; a step out of darkness into light. It was 
the dawn of the religious life of the world. How did man 
ever come to make such a stride as that ? I propose to sug- 
gest just in a word — for I have time for nothing more — 
two or three reasons which would naturally lead men out of 
henotheism and into monotheism, out of the belief in many 
gods into the belief in one. i. In the first place, the simple 
fact that the people exclusively worshipped one god would 
naturally develop in them the faith that he was the only one 
there was. 2. In the second place, political considerations, 
political pride, political growth and greatness, would tend in 
this same direction. As a people became great, and their 
god grew with their greatness, they would very naturally look 
down with scorn and contempt upon the gods of other peo- 
ples, and would naturally come to believe at last that they 
were no gods at all who could not defend their people and 
make them great or mighty. 3. And another thing, in the 
third place. I believe that one grand reason why the He- 
brews came to be the first monotheists of which we have any 
knowledge was the absolute and fierce Mosaic prohibition of 
idolatry. You remember how astonished the Roman soldiers 
were, when they came to the temple of Jerusalem after they 
had battered down all opposition. They entered the holy 
place, and then pulled aside the veil and looked into the 



Origin and Development of the Idea. 25 

holy of holies. They stood in dumb amazement, for it was 
empty. They were hunting for the god of the Jews ; and, 
when they came to the place where they supposed he made 
his abode, there was nothing there. And this was the one 
great reason, I believe, that operated more mightily than any 
other in developing the monotheism of the Jews. They wor- 
shipped an invisible, spiritual, and mighty power that per- 
vaded all the earth. They came to worship such in their 
later life ; and it was easy for them to draw a contrast and 
say, "Our god is alive, your gods are nothing but idols." 
And they flung at them their witty sarcasm and contempt, 
as in the lesson that I read you from the later Isaiah this 
morning. (Isa. xliv.) 4. Then of course there was working, 
in the fourth place, a growing sense of the law and order of 
the world. This is illustrated well in the story of Abraham, 
told by the rabbis. Of course, it has its origin many and 
many a hundred year this side the time of Abraham. It 
was said that at first Abraham was a sun-worshipper. No 
doubt he was. And he said as he looked at the sun, " This 
is my god, and I will worship him." But by and by night 
came, and the sun went down. And Abraham said, "That 
cannot be God who sets and is swallowed up by the dark- 
ness." Then the moon arose, and he said, "This is God, and 
these stars are the hosts of his followers." But by and by 
the moon set, and the stars, too, became dark ; and he said : 
" These cannot be gods. The sun and the moon move in 
their regular round : they are under some law. I will wor- 
ship him alone who makes that law and who controls their 
movements." Under these influences there would naturally 
spring up a belief in monotheism. 

But still there is another step to be taken. They wor- 
shipped one god among the Jews. Among the Samaritans, 
they believed in only one god ; but they still believed that 



26 God. 

this god was located, that he was attached to a place. One 
day, some one came to Jesus, and said: "Where shall we 
worship God ? The Samaritans say we should worship him 
on Gerazim ; the Jews say that we should worship him in 
the temple on Mount Moriah. You, as the Messiah, can 
settle this question." Then came that great ringing word 
which was the death-knell of a localized deity, which set God 
free and made him an inhabitant of eternity : " Neither in 
this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem shall men worship the 
Father. God is " — not a spirit. That little letter a is a huge 
mistake. Jesus said, " God is spirit ; and they that worship 
him must worship him in spirit and in truth." Now, then, 
the race in the person of Jesus had attained free, spiritual 
monotheism. 

And the Church, in the words of its articles, has declared 
from that time to this, what few, only a few, so far as I 
know, really think and believe, — that God is a being "without 
body, parts, or passions." These are the words of the thirty- 
nine articles of the Church of England. And yet is it not 
true that the great majority of Christendom still think of 
God as a body, as outlined, as localized, as living in some 
particular place, as sitting in some particular seat of power ? 
But we must not look in church articles, if we want to find 
what the people really believe. Look at their poetry, their 
traditions, their myths, their stories. Dante tells us better 
than church articles what was the creed of the Middle Ages. 
In Dante, we find God in his Paradise, withdrawn from sight 
indeed, in a cloud so brilliant that the eye of man could not 
look upon it ; and yet to Dante's thinking, and the thinking 
of the Middle Ages, God, in some sort of shape, outline, and 
power was there in that cloud as he was nowhere else. Take 
Paradise Lost as the expression of the faith of the English 
race. God there is simply another Jupiter, sitting on a throne 



Origin and Development of the Idea, 2*J 

in heaven and hurling thunder-bolts, organizing an army to 
drive out rebellious angels. And these angels, although they 
could not be mortally wounded, were capable of being thrust 
through with spears, being shot with arrows, capable of hurl- 
ing craggy mountains through the air, and tumbling each 
other underneath their ragged ruins. This is a common 
picture of God, as living somewhere, sitting somewhere, 
ruling somewhere, more than he is anywhere else, I am not 
to-day to enter into the discussion as to whether this is true 
or not true. I simply aim to set forth what is the popular 
belief. 

It now remains for me, as carefully and as briefly as pos- 
sible, to outline for you the main theories concerning God 
that have filled the thought and that occupy the attention of 
the modern world. 

i. In the first place, there is the theory that I have just 
spoken of, — God an outlined, visible being, somewhere out- 
side of the universe. He lived alone through a measureless 
eternity. By and by, he waked up, and concluded to make 
something else to exist outside himself. He created matter 
out of nothing. Then he used this rough substance with 
which to build worlds, — made them as a carpenter builds 
a house, as a shipwright constructs a ship and sets it out 
there upon the ocean with its wings and sails. So he made 
these universes, and flung the stars off into space and told 
them to follow such and such paths forever. 

2. Secondly, there is the theory that I may properly call 
"scientific atheism," the theory that says we do not need 
any god at all. "Only give me matter and force," say these 
men, "and I will account for the universe." And if you say 
to them, But where do you get your matter and your force ? 
their answer will be, — what I think you will find a pretty 
hard one to reply to, — "It is just as easy for us to assume 



28 God. 

our matter and our force as it is for you to assume your 
God." This is the position of scientific atheism. 

3. The third position is pantheism. What is that? It is 
the belief that God is coexistent and cosubstantial with the 
universe ; that nature is God, and God is nature. And that 
is all there is of it. That is pantheism. 

4. Another belief, for which I have no name, I shall con- 
nect with the somewhat famous book written by two prom, 
inent scientific men of England, under the title of The 
Unseen Universe. They teach that there is a spiritual and 
invisible universe occupying the same space with this visible 
and tangible one ; that the tangible universe has come out 
of that spiritual one, and returns to it again ; that God is the 
life and the light and the power of both, manifesting himself 
in the spiritual realm and then in the visible realm, and that 
one is the shadow of the other. This these men claim is 
perfectly consistent with all known results of science ; and 
I, at any rate, am not wise enough to contradict them. 

5. The fifth theory of which I wish to speak goes by the 
name of "Agnosticism," — a common name in this age, one 
that stands for principles very widely held. It is the belief 
of those men who say man's faculties are limited ; there is no 
possibility of his knowing anything except natural phenom- 
ena. There may be a God, or there may not be one ; but, at 
any rate, we neither know nor can know anything about it. 
The man who takes that ground is called an agnostic. 

6. There is still one more ; and that is the belief in the im- 
manence of God in the universe, — that is, a belief that God is 
the life and soul of this universe, in some such sense as what 
we call our mind is the life and soul of the body ; that God 
is intelligence, that God is love, that God is will ; and that he 
lives in and manifests himself through this universe, which is 
his body and of which he is the soul. 



Origin and Development of the Idea. 29 

I have thus, as briefly and clearly as I could, traced for 
you the origin and the development of man's belief con- 
cerning God. It will be my business, in the following ser- 
mons of this series, to take up, one after another, the great 
questions that spring out of this theme, and try, if I can, to 
find out what we ought to think, what we ought to feel, what 
we ought to do. 



DOES GOD EXIST? 



I am now to undertake the discussion of a theme than 
which there is none conceivable more profound or diffi- 
cult. It is surrounded by so many misconceptions, so many 
misunderstandings, prejudices, hopes, and fears, that I hardly 
dare expect that I shall be in all cases understood, or make 
my discussion satisfactory to any large number of you. 
I shall leave one side almost entirely the old methods 
and the old arguments, and shall approach the theme in 
what, so far as I know, is a way new to sermonizing. I wish 
that you would bear clearly in mind the one single purpose 
that I have in view. I am not to raise the question as to 
whether a particular kind of god exists; whether there is 
a god in the universe answering to your mental picture or 
mine ; whether there is a personal god or a conscious god ; 
or, what are the characteristics and attributes of his being. 
These are themes that I shall hope to reach by and by. 
But they are beyond the possibility of this morning's discus- 
sion. I ask you then to keep in mind this one question, and 
this alone : Does there exist a being that we may properly 
call God ? That and that only is my morning's theme. 

A child new-born, and for long after its birth, is, so 
far as we know, unconscious of the distinction between it- 
self and the things that are about it. The first step, then, 
that man takes in his knowledge of this wonderful world, is 



Does He Exist ? 31 

the discovery that there are at least two beings in existence, 
— himself and something outside that is not self. The next 
step that we take is the discovery that this not-self is the 
wonderful world, presenting itself to us under thousands of 
different aspects and forms and colors and forces. Here is, 
outside of ourselves, that exists independently of our voli- 
tion, a being that as yet man has only begun to study and 
does not at all comprehend. This being, — call it world or 
universe or whatever you please, that presents itself to us 
under the shape of earth, grass, trees, brooks, rivers, moun- 
tains, clouds, oceans, and then the illimitable of stars and 
worlds all about us, — this being existed before we were 
born. It will exist after we have died. It lives then inde- 
pendently of us, and with no reference whatever to our 
volition. In some mysterious way, we trace this being as 
the source of our existence. Out of this being we have 
come; our bodies, — notice the significance of this, — our 
bodies not only, but our minds. Out of this mysterious 
fountain has come what we call "life," — life in all its infi- 
nite range, whose thought sweeps from the abyss beneath our 
feet to the highest heavens over our heads, toward which we 
aspire. Out of it has blossomed foot and hand and brain ; 
and out of this brain, thought and feeling, and love and hate, 
and hope and fear ; not only an animal that hungers, but a 
Shakespeare who thinks, who dreams a Hamlet, a Goethe 
who dreams a Faust, a Jesus who dreams " Our Father in 
heaven," and bows down upon his knees in worship, and 
lifts up and thrills the hearts of the centuries by his words 
of religious inspiration and life. In some way, I say, all this 
has come out of this being, call it world or universe or what 
you will. " It," in the words of the old psalmist, "is He" — 
shall I say it? Not yet. Suppose we substitute in place of 
He the word "it," — for we do not propose to assume any 



32 God. 

thing, — and see if the wonder is lessened any : " It is " // 
"that hath made us, and not we ourselves." So much at any 
rate is scientifically true ; and, if you can think it is any less 
wonderful that an it should make us than that a he should be 
our father, take the z/, if you will. I am satisfied. 

On this being, moreover, we depend every moment of our 
lives for all that we have of love and goodness, and happi- 
ness and peace, and beauty and hope. This being it is that, 
by and by, in spite of all our precaution, whether with or 
against our will, will call us away ; and we shall cease to walk 
here among our fellows ; shall be gone — where ? This being, 
moreover, it or he, is our law-giver. In his laws or in its 
laws is life. It is by finding out the laws of this universe, 
and obeying them, that all the good of life comes to us, — all 
its health, all its genius, all its beauty, all its joy. May we 
not again, borrowing the words of the Psalmist, — for these 
parallelisms are wondrous and striking, — may we not again 
say, "In his" or its "favor is life"; and at its "right 
hand" — using a poetic figure — "there are pleasures for 
evermore " ? For all the good, all the beauty, all the power 
of the world, come to us simply from knowing and obeying 
the will or the laws of this being. On the other hand, this 
is a being that inexorably, inevitably, and forever punishes 
the slightest infraction of its laws. In its favor is life, in its 
anger — to use a poetic figure again — is death. Disobedi- 
ence to the laws of this being means diminution of life; 
carried far enough, means life's extinction. 

This being again, how old is it? It is eternal. "From 
everlasting to everlasting, thou art" — not God, — I will not 
say that yet, — but "thou art." We will stop there. This 
being is eternal. We cannot possibly conceive a beginning, 
we cannot possibly conceive an end. Suppose we try to im- 
agine a time when the sun and the moon and all this visible 



Does He Exist ? 33 

universe were not, when space was a blank. We can per- 
haps imagine such a time, but we cannot imagine a conscious 
living being existing for eternity in a blank ; for it is a part 
of our very conception of life that it should act. Life means 
motion. And we must either conceive that things have existed 
forever, or we must conceive the absurdity of supposing that 
suddenly, without cause, something began to be. 

This being, then, that surrounds us on every hand, is an 
eternal being. Not only that, it is an infinite being. As 
we cannot conceive a beginning nor an end, so neither can 
we conceive a limit anywhere. Suppose we take one little 
simple calculation, and use it as the lower step of a stairway 
by which I must leave your imaginations to climb toward a 
conception of the vastness of this universe. If a train of 
cars should start to-day and travel toward the sun at the rate, 
of sixty miles an hour, and twenty-four hours a day, and three 
hundred and sixty-five days in a year, it would take more 
than one hundred and seventy years to reach the sun. And 
the sun is our next-door neighbor ; and our solar system is 
a little flake of light on the borders of infinity. Think again. 
Light covers this distance between the sun and the earth, 
that would take a train of cars one hundred and seventy 
years to traverse, — light leaps that distance in a little more 
than eight minutes. And yet, travelling at that inconceiv- 
able speed, we know that there are suns so far away that it 
has taken thousands, millions of years for their light to reach 
us. May we not, then, say that this being is infinite ? The 
scientific man, who sits with his pencil over his figures, knows 
that this is an infinite universe. Take the wings of this light, 
if you will, and travel to that star that the telescope has just 
caught a glimpse of, the light of which has been twenty-five 
millions of years in reaching the earth ; and, when you are 
there, what ? Only the first step out into this wilderness of 



34 God. 

worlds, — suns and stars and worlds still beyond. And sup- 
pose you could conceive of yourself as standing on the edge 
of the visible universe, and looking down into the very blank 
of space, what then? Space still, on and on forever. Or 
conceive a wall from the height of the zenith to the depth of 
the abyss, — space forever beyond your walls, no conceivable 
limit anywhere. This, then, is the infinite being that we are 
contemplating. 

Not only infinite, it is also omnipotent. We talk of 
power. As in the case of distance, let me give you one or 
two simple figures to help your imagination to climb to 
a conception of some of the smaller manifestations of power. 
I hold a drop of water in my hand. Do you know how 
much power there is in that? The chemical force of that 
little drop of water is equal to that which is manifested by 
a flash of lightning that streams across the sky and the 
reverberating thunder that rings round the heavens. Do 
you know what the power of gravitation means ? Do you 
know that, if you should take a bar of solid steel a mile 
square, and lay it beside the Catskill range of mountains, it 
would dwarf them, and their summits would be below its 
highest level ? If you could attach such a mile-square beam 
of solid steel to the moon, do you think that would represent 
the power of gravity that holds the little orb of night in its 
place, as it circles about the earth ? Think what the power 
of gravitation means, when I tell you that it would take 
eighty-seven thousand bars of steel a mile square to repre- 
sent the power by which the earth holds the moon in its 
place ! If you should cover the earth with threads of steel 
a quarter of an inch in diameter stretched from the earth to 
the moon, to hold the moon in its place, it would take 
enough of them to cover that side of the earth which is 
turned toward the moon with these steel spires only six 



Does He Exist? 35 

inches apart. And this moon is only a little fragment, 
a worn-out asteroid ; and our solar system is nothing in the 
deeps of space. Does omnipotence mean something to you 
in the presence of figures like that ? We stand, then, face 
to face with an omnipotent being. 

And then, again, this being that used to be worshipped 
under the phases of polytheism in its ten thousand forms, this 
being is now known to be essentially one, not many. The 
grandest result of modern science is the demonstration of 
the unity of the universe. That is what universe means. That 
is the significance that we find in the little word " cosmos ": 
one, a system all bound together by unity, — unity of life, unity 
of law, unity of power. We are settling it rapidly — I think, 
beyond question — that all this material universe is one sub- 
stance. The spectroscope has revealed to us the fact that in 
sun and moon and most distant star or flake of light on the 
farthest verge of the visible sky, — that all these contain in 
themselves the same metals and substances that constitute the 
globe on which we live. — Unity of substance throughout the 
universe. Chemistry has already reduced its elements to a 
very few; and the most far-sighted students of the world tell 
us that they expect by and by to find not fifty or sixty chemi- 
cal elements, but only one ; and that all the infinite diversity 
and variety of the world depend upon the multiplex arrange- 
ment and combinations of these simple elements. 

And then we know, as beyond question, that there is only 
one power in the universe. One of the grandest results of 
modern science is the demonstration of what is called the 
" conservation and correlation of forces," or the " persistence 
of force." That is, there is only one force in the universe; 
and all the ten thousand varieties are manifestations, under 
different circumstances, of this one. For example, to illus- 
trate in little what I mean, suppose I had suspended from 



36 God. 

the ceiling here to-day a rod of iron an inch in diameter. 
There is the substance which you see. Suppose I begin, by 
some machinery that enables me to move it very rapidly, to 
vibrate this bar of iron : there is motion. I move it more 
rapidly still, and soon your ear detects a sound, a buzz : this 
motion has become sound. More rapidly still, and it begins 
to glow, to become red-hot : motion has become color. More 
rapidly still, and it is white-hot, glowing with a light like the 
sun ; and motion has become light. This simply as illustrat- 
ing how all the different varieties of force in the world have 
been and are being translated one into the other. So we 
know that at bottom there is unity under it all. 

This being, then, that surrounds us, out of which we have 
come, this infinite and eternal and omnipotent, is one being; 
as Tennyson phrases it,— 

" One , one law, one element." 

Shall we go on and repeat his next line ? — 

" And one far-off divine event, 
To which the whole creation moves." 

We may at least say this as the result of absolute demon- 
stration : that there can be traced in the history of the uni- 
verse, from the beginning until now, the progress of an 
intelligible purpose. I do not assume to say that the intel- 
ligence expressed in this is like our human intelligence. All 
I care for is simply this, — that here is a purpose running 
through the ages, linking them all together, that is intelli- 
gible to us. And this is intelligent in the only sense of that 
word which can have any meaning for us. 

How far, then, have we got in the discussion of this 
theme? We have reached the point, I think, where I am 
justified in saying that we have a certain knowledge of a 
being who possesses all the attributes that are essential to 



Does He Exist ? 37 

our conception of what we have been accustomed to call 
God; a being self-existent; a being eternal, infinite, out of 
whose life we have come; a being controlling us by its laws; 
a being omnipotent ; a being that is one ; a being whose track 
through the ages betrays the pathway of an intelligent pur- 
pose. Is not this what we have been accustomed always 
to mean, when we have said " God " ? Personality, as it is 
ordinarily defined, is no necessary attribute of God. Per- 
sonality, as we know it, carries with it limitation and mor- 
tality. It is not necessary, then, to the completeness of our 
conception of God, that we should say, in the ordinary use 
of that word, that he is personal. It is not necessary that 
we should say, in the ordinary use of that word, that he is 
conscious. But what name can we give to a being who is 
infinite and eternal and omnipotent, who creates life and de- 
stroys, out of whom come intelligence, personality, thought, 
will, love, hope, fear, aspiration, worship, — what word, I say, 
will you use to symbolize a being like that ? Not only this. 
This one point more I must impress upon your attention. 
This being, in some of its manifestations, has always inspired 
in the human heart the sentiments of awe, of reverence, and 
of worship : in grotesque and hideous forms, in the days of 
barbarism ; and in the highest and purest inspirations on the 
part of the noblest poets and dreamers and prophets of the 
world. What does Byron mean when he stands facing 
the Alps, and says, — 

" To me high mountains are a feeling " ? 

What does he mean when he says, — 

" There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, 
There is a rapture on the lonely shore, 
There is society, where none intrudes, 
By the deep sea, and music in its roar " ? 



38 God. 

What does Wordsworth mean when he speaks of 

. . "A presence that disturbs 
Me with the joy of elevated thought " ? 

What does Bryant mean when, pausing before his ancient 
wood, he says, — 

" Father, thy hand 
Hath reared these venerable columns, thou 
Didst weave this verdant roof " ? 

I only ask you to take these things as the natural poetic 
expression of human sentiment, nothing more. Only, is it not 
a little strange, is it not worth our while to stop just a mo- 
ment and think of its significance, that one pile of dead, inert 
matter should make another body of dead, inert matter feel 
the sense of the sublime, feel like getting down on its knees 
to worship it? What is there in a pile of dead matter to 
worship? How has it come about that this sentiment of 
reverence and aspiration is called out by all that we name 
grand and magnificent in nature ? These sentiments, friends, 
are facts, as solid facts as the ribs of the Rocky Mountains, 
as solid facts as the bones and fossils in your museums ; and 
they demand an explanation as much as these. How does 
it happen, then, I say, that one particle of matter should 
want to get down on its knees to another particle of matter, 
if in both cases they are only dead and inert substance? 
And the absurdity is even heightened, if there is nothing 
but deadness and inertness in the universe around me, and 
I, a man, not dead and inert, have somehow come to feel 
a desire to bow and reverence and worship. It is utterly 
inexplicable. Search as you will, you will find no sensible 
explanation of it. 

Now, then, shall we call this being God, or shall we call it 
Nature, or shall we call it Law, or Power, or Universe ? Let 
me give you one reason that to me is conclusive why I must 



Does He Exist ? 39 

call it God. I shall not dictate as to the name which you 
shall apply. The word "nature," the word "universe," the 
words "law," "force," "power," — all these have come to have 
attached to them a definite, dictionary meaning; and the 
meaning of those words excludes the idea of what we call 
conscious life. Now, then, I say, if you apply these words 
and these alone to the universe, you are doing an utterly 
unwarrantable thing ; that is, you are assuming a settlement 
of this grand question, and assuming it in the negative. You 
are assuming that there is nothing but what you call matter 
here ; when that is just the question that is filling the heart 
and thought of the world. 

Suppose, for example, that in addressing you I should stop 
calling you man, and call you body. Body, in the use w T e 
have been accustomed to give to it, means the body when 
the life has gone. We speak of the body of the dead. We 
mean the body when that which we call mind and affection 
and thought have departed, no matter what they were or 
where they have gone. Body means death. But, when 
I call you man, I leave the question open. I do not say that 
you have a soul separable from your body, that can be taken 
out of it and exist somewhere else. I simply use a term 
that covers the body, and, if you have a mind and a soul, 
covers them too, leaving the question open. And so, when 
I use for this universe the word God, I do not use a word to 
express the idea that there is a god located in some place, 
or that there is a god separable from the universe who can 
go outside of it and look at it, as a man can go out and gaze 
upon his house. I simply use a term that covers the mate- 
rial universe, and, if there be anything more than what I 
call nature, covers that too. There is no other word then, 
so far as I know, in the range of human language, that we 
have a right to apply to this great being, except the name 
God. 



40 God. 

Now, I want to raise the question — and answer it, if I can 
— as to whether this being about whom or which I have 
been speaking is matter, in the ordinary use of that word, or 
whether it is spirit. That is the great question on which the 
whole discussion turns. Is it not important enough, then, so 
that I have a right to ask you to think a little closely, if need 
be, to understand what I mean ? 

Suppose we call it matter. You may call it that, if you 
will : I will not quarrel about words ; but, if you do, remem- 
ber this, — you must change, even to utter reversal, your 
whole definition of matter. Call it matter, if you will ; and 
yet, on that theory, you must admit that matter is something 
that thinks, matter is something that feels, matter is some- 
thing that loves, matter is something that hates, matter is 
something that aspires, matter is something that worships 
other matter. If you call it matter, you must admit that 
definition. 

Let us take our next step. We are accustomed to assume 
that matter is a very simple thing, to think we know all about 
it, and that the great mystery of the universe is mind. Matter, 
we say, — why, it is the every-day drudge : we stamp it under 
our feet ; the wind blows it into our faces ; we mould it into 
bricks, and of it build the walls of our houses. It is the brute 
beast that we ride and beat at our will. Why, we know all 
about matter. Mind, you think, is the thing that is mysteri- 
ous. Matter is simple enough ! And yet let me tell you, and 
ask you to think carefully until you see what it means, the only 
thing in this world about which we have direct, actual knowl- 
edge is mind. Even the existence of matter is an inference, 
and no subject of direct knowledge at all. It is mind of 
which we have direct and actual knowledge in our conscious- 
ness. And what do we know of the universe, of its suns and 
stars and systems and the various forms and forces of this 



Does He Exist f 41 

world of ours ? We only know and can study its images 
and reflections as they glass themselves in our consciousness. 
Let me illustrate what I mean : I put out my hand and touch 
this reading-desk. I say, There is something that is hard. 
What do I mean ? I mean nothing more nor less than this : 
that there is a force there which thrills through the nerve of 
sensation in my arm, up into my brain, and translates itself 
into my consciousness as something that resists my touch. 
What this thing is that resists, nobody on the face of the 
wide earth knows. Take another illustration in regard to 
color. Suppose I had in my hand a book, the cover of which 
was blue. What do I mean by saying that it is blue ? I 
mean simply that in a certain state of the light there is a 
sensation communicated to my optic nerve, which, running 
up into my brain, translates itself into my consciousness 
again as something which I call color. If it were night, and 
the gas were lighted, this same blue would be green. There 
is no blueness or greenness inhering in the thing itself : it is 
simply a sensation of mine, a phase of my own conscious- 
ness. This morning, when the organ was being played, I 
heard something that I called music. What do I mean by 
that, again? I mean simply that certain pulsations in the 
air are started by the touch of the organist upon the instru- 
ment, that those sensations communicate with my auditory 
nerve that runs into the brain, and that here those sensations 
are translated again into what I call consciousness. All I 
know, then, of this outside world, are facts of consciousness 
which are utterly unlike the outside world. So that all I can 
do is to infer certain things. All I know is that there is 
something outside of me, — a being, a power, a force, which 
manifests itself to me in these ten thousand different ways. 

You know what a piece of matter is, do you ? Let us look 
for it a moment ; let us hunt, and see if we can find it. Sup- 



42 God. 

pose I have here in my hands a block of steel a foot square. 
I can apply to it a certain degree of heat, and it will become 
molten and run like water, as I saw tons of it running in the 
great steel manufactories of Sheffield. Apply still more heat, 
and it goes off into the air as a vapor, visible still ; more heat, 
and it has eluded my senses, and is floating nobody knows 
where. Take this same piece of steel again. Do its particles 
touch each other? Is it perfectly solid? No. Because, if 
I apply to it sufficient force, I can compress it into still smaller 
space than it now occupies. That means that the ultimate 
particles, if there are any, do not touch each other. It is a 
part of our definition of matter that it is a centre of force ; a 
something solid, so that no two particles of it can occupy the 
same place at the same time. These particles of the steel 
cannot touch each other so as to make the block all solid, 
or else I could not compress them any nearer together. And 
yet they hold themselves in their present position in some way, 
as though they were linked by hooks and bands ; so that it 
would take the power of a thousand giants to pull them apart. 
Scientific men tell us that force cannot exist apart from 
matter. Let us see the dilemma we are placed in, then, con- 
cerning this simple matter about which we supposed we knew 
so much. Two particles of matter, I have said, cannot oc- 
cupy the same space at the same time, provided they are solid 
and substantial. And we know that the particles in this 
piece of steel do not touch each other, because we can com- 
press it into a smaller space. Still, they exert force upon 
each other. We are now, then, face to face with a dilemma. 
Scientific men try to understand how it is that the power of 
the sun comes across the great gulf that separates it from 
our planet, so as to affect this earth. And, assuming as they 
do that force cannot exist where there is no matter, they say 
that this space between the earth and the sun must be filled 



Does He Exist ? 43 

with a very highly attenuated matter, which they call ether, be- 
coming the medium of communication. They say that the 
interstices in this block of steel must also be rilled with the 
ether, so that the force can pass through this ether from one 
ultimate atom to another. And yet, friends, see the absurdity 
of the dilemma in which we are placed. If every point of 
space is filled with a point of substantial matter, then all 
space would be solid ; and movement of any kind, on the 
part of anybody or anything, would be impossible. And, if 
all space is not solid, then force not only does, but it must, 
exist where there is no solid particle of matter. This one di- 
lemma, if you think of it and understand what it means, is 
the absolute death of what is called materialism. Force does 
exist where there is no solid particle of matter. Then there 
is no need of supposing matter to exist in order to explain 
force 1 and we are face to face with this grand fact which 
was the outcome and result of Faraday's deepest study : and 
Faraday was the greatest chemist of his age. He said that, 
when we pursue these ultimate particles of matter and try to 
find an atom, we find some mysterious thing that we can only 
call "a point of force." Matter simple, then? Nobody in 
the world can find it out. Nobody knows where it is or 
what it is. Seek for it, and it eludes your grasp like the shadow 
of a spirit. It melts away until all this grand universe, as 
Shakespeare dreamed, — 

" The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, 
The solemn temples, the great globe itself, 
Yea, all which it inherit," do " dissolve, 
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, 
Leave not a rack behind." 

Matter is not a simple thing, then. It is the deepest mys- 
tery of the world. 

One more point. I cannot possibly explain the fact that I 



44 God. 

think and feel, if I am a materialist. You cannot possibly 
explain it, if you are a materialist. Consider for a moment. 
A thought or a feeling is utterly unlike what we call matter. 
A thought has no extension. Love is not hard. Neither of 
these has any color. Hope has none of the qualities that I 
attribute to this desk or to the book that I hold in my hand. 
And I cannot possibly explain the fact that I think and feel, 
in terms of matter. This much is true : I know that, every 
time I think, that thought is accompanied by certain molec- 
ular movements in my brain ; and that thought in this way 
wears out the brain as much as shovelling wears out the hand. 
When Shakespeare was thinking of King Lear, and writ- 
ing that wondrous play, he was wearing out his brain and 
was undergoing a physical strain, as much as a dray-horse 
when it drags its load of pig-iron. So much is true on the 
materialistic side. And yet no one can bridge the gulf be- 
tween thought and matter. 

One more step. While I cannot explain thought and 
feeling in terms of matter, yet, on the other hand, the uni- 
verse, this wondrous, solid thing of which you have been 
accustomed to think, can be explained in terms of mind. 
I know what thought is and what feeling is. I have direct 
cognizance of them. And I can understand how it may be, 
and must be, that the universe should seem to me to be 
dead, although at the same time it may be alive. All I can 
be conscious of is the aggregate of feelings that makes up my 
personal consciousness. So this universe may be all thrill- 
ing and throbbing with a conscious life for aught I know ; 
but it must seem to be unconscious and dead to me, because 
it does not come within the range of my consciousness. 
This, then, is all I wish you to understand on that point : 
that, while we cannot explain thought and feeling, if there is 
nothing but matter in the universe, we can explain this 



Does He Exist f 45 

subtle, mysterious something that we call matter, on the 
supposition that there is nothing but that which we call 
spirit in the universe. This is no personal whim of mine, 
strange and startling as it may seem to you. The men that 
the pulpit fulminates against as materialists, — as Huxley, 
Tyndall, Herbert Spencer, and John Fiske, — all these great 
leaders of the modern thought of the world will tell you 
precisely the same truth. They are the great champions 
of anti-materialism, declaring it to be crude science and 
absurd philosophy. Mr. Huxley himself goes so far as to 
say deliberately that, if he must choose between the mate- 
rialism of a man like Biichner and the idealism of a man like 
Berkeley, the facts of science compel him to be an idealist. 

As the outcome of it all, then, what do we know, — not 
what do we guess, but how much do we know ? I know, 
first, that life is, for I live. I know that thought is, for I 
think. I know that feeling is, for I feel. I know that love 
is, for I love. I know that hope is, for I hope. I know 
that aspiration is, for I aspire. I know that worship is, for 
I worship. These things we know ; and such as these are 
the only things that, by direct consciousness, we do know. 
One more thing we know : while I do not know what matter 
is in itself, I do know that outside of, beneath, above, around 
me, — eternal, infinite, omnipotent, one, — I know there exists 
a life and a power back of phenomena, underneath phe- 
nomena, that manifests itself in these ten thousand different 
ways. Mr. Herbert Spencer will tell you that this, next to 
our own personal consciousness, is the one thing more abso- 
lutely certain than anything else in the world. We know 
that such a power as this exists. On the theory that this 
power is dead and inert matter, it is utterly inexplicable 
that I live. But, while I know that I live, it is perfectly 
explicable and rational that I should suppose that this 



46 God. 

being should also live, and at the same time seem to me, 
as related to my consciousness, the thing that I call matter. 
The one thing certain is that I live, the next thing certain 
is that this being exists. And the most rational explanation 
of it and of me is that this Being that exists is Life, with 
all that word implies and contains. So that I am justified, 
in the light of the most rigid demonstration, to close this 
morning by chanting the beginning of that beautiful hymn: — 

" Thou art, O God, the life and light 

Of all this wondrous world we see. 
Its glow by day, its smile by night, 

Are but reflections caught from thee. 
Where'er we turn, thy glories shine, 
And all things fair and bright are thine." 



Agnosticism; or, Can We Know God? 



Agnosticism, — just what does the word mean, and what 
class of thinkers does it cover ? As a school of philosophy, 
this agnostic type of thought has been more largely devel- 
oped in Europe, on the Continent and in England, than it 
has here; though it is lying, in some loose way, in the 
minds of thousands of Americans, or floating cloud-like, 
though not clearly outlined, in all the theological air of the 
day. Agnosticism, — what is it ? It is simply despair of 
knowledge in regard to the mysteries of the universe ; it is 
giving up these great questions that have lured on the race 
from the beginning until now ; it is saying : " It is of no 
use. These problems are insoluble. They are beyond the 
reach of the human intellect. There may be a god or there 
may not ; but the world has never settled the question, and 
we see no prospect that it ever will settle it ; so let us turn 
to something else." This, in brief and in general terms, is 
the type of thought that is covered by this word. 

Now, however firm may be our faith, however irreligious 
to us or to any of us may seem a type of thought like this, 
one thing we must remember and look fairly in the face; 
and that is that whatever belief or unbelief is held by large 
numbers of thoughtful, earnest, scholarly men, is something 
not lightly to be brushed aside by a wave of the hand. And 
when we find men holding this position of agnosticism, who 



48 God. 

are as gentle, as true, as pure, as loyal to principle, as noble 
in their endeavor as are the most earnest and simple-hearted 
of religionists, we must admit that, whatever this is, it is 
something consistent with being good, grand, noble men. 
There must be a cause for this type of thought. Let us for 
a moment, then, at the outset, glance at two or three things 
that have conduced to bring it about. 

It seems to me that it is perfectly natural, whether we find 
it justifiable or not. In the first place, it is a reaction, and 
a very justifiable reaction, against the old-time and very 
common assumption of an over-familiarity with God. Take 
up any one of the works of the old theologians, and you find 
that they talked as if they knew everything about God ; as 
though it were not only an " open secret," but no secret 
at all. They understand God better than they know their 
next-door neighbors. They know what he was doing in 
the eternity before the world was created. They will tell 
you how the three persons of the Trinity formed a little 
select society by themselves, enjoying each other's company, 
carrying on conversations with each other ; how they deter- 
mined once on a time — why just then, no one knows — that 
they would create the world ; how they settled it that that 
world should be created in such a way that this being, man, 
should certainly fall and become a rebel against God. And 
then, in order to bring about a deliverance from this evil 
which the gods or God himself had created, these three per- 
sonalities entered into a covenant, which they call the " cove- 
nant of redemption/' by which the Son agrees to be sent to 
suffer and to die, the Father agrees to send him and superin- 
tend his work, and the Holy Spirit agrees to undertake the 
completion and carrying out of that work after the crucifixion 
is accomplished. They tell us all about these things as 
though they knew God as intimately as they understood 



Can We Know Him ? 49 

the management of their own town-meeting affairs. Is it 
not perfectly natural, as men developed in thought, as they 
developed in reverence even, in the finest qualities of the 
religious life, that there should be an earnest revolt against 
such assumptions of impious familiarity with the Infinite ? 

Not only did they revolt against this assumption of over- 
knowledge, but this doctrine of agnosticism has at its heart 
a moral quality. It is also a revolt against the unjust 
and immoral conception of God which has obtained in the 
ages of the past. They say : " If this be your God, we will 
have none of him. We will rather worship nature ; we will 
worship humanity ; we will do the best we can in the dark- 
ness ; but we cannot bend our knees to a God whose char- 
acter we cannot respect and whose attributes we cannot 
adore." 

Then, the development of modern knowledge, the unveil- 
ing of this wondrous universe of ours, has conduced to bring 
about this type of thought. It was very easy to picture God 
in the old little universe, — the universe of Dante, the uni- 
verse of Milton, the universe of the Old Testament, — a 
universe not nearly so large as our present solar system, 
which solar system we know to be an infinitesimal grain of 
sand on the seashore of infinity. It was very easy, I say, 
to conceive that you could know all about God, the god 
of a little world like that. But this universe has dissolved, 
— dissolved like a morning mist ; and, as with opened eyes 
we look up and down and away, we see everywhere about 
us limitless infinity. And it seems to a thoughtful man 
the most unspeakable presumption that he should claim to 
fathom the unfathomable; that he should claim to know 
that which thought becomes weary even with trying to con- 
ceive. And I verily believe that the agnostic is more rever- 
ential in the truest sense of the word, is more religious, when 



50 God. 

he simply stands bowed in the presence of the unknown and 
the infinite, and says, "All this is beyond me," — more rever- 
ential, more religious, I say, than the man who, with his little 
chart and compass and measuring-rod, is laying out, as he 
would an insignificant township, the limitless field of the 
absolute and eternal. 

Then, as the world has progressed and modern knowledge 
has deepened, the old arguments concerning God have faded 
away. Take, for example, as an illustration of what I mean, 
the argument from design. That was the great weapon, 
you remember, of men like Paley. Paley's watch has be- 
come very famous in theological discussion. He said, I 
trace everywhere in this watch evidences of design ; and de- 
sign indicates a designer. So of the manifest adaptations 
in nature. A flower, for example, is adapted to the place 
where it grows. One kind of flower is adapted for life in 
the tropics : it grows in the tropics. Another is adapted to 
live close up by the snow-line, on the highest peaks of the 
Alps or the Andes ; and another is adapted to live some- 
where else. Or, for example, on some islands of the Pacific, 
you find that the insects are almost wingless, unable to sus- 
tain themselves for any time in the air. All these, and the 
thousands like them, betray a designing mind. But the sci- 
entist explains all these facts by saying : Of course, you see 
this which seems to you like design ; but it is all easily ac- 
counted for by the law of natural selection. A flower grows 
in the tropics, you say. Why? It is adapted to live in the 
tropics, therefore it was designed to live there. No, says the 
scientist : it lives in the tropics just because it is the product 
of, and so adapted to, its surroundings ; and, if it were not 
adapted to its surroundings, it would die. Therefore, that 
which lives is adapted to its surroundings, and must be. 
So, in regard to these wingless insects of the Pacific islands. 



Can We Know Him ? 51 

Why are they wingless ? What is the secret of this curious 
adaptation ? These islands, being largely bare of vegetation, 
are swept by the winds from one year's end to the other \ 
and those insects which possess wings and lift themselves 
up into the air are blown off into the sea, and perish. Only 
those that are wingless, and keep thus close to the ground, 
survive and propagate their kind. Of course, they are 
adapted to the place ! If they were not, they would die out. 
Thus, they tell us they can dispense with the old argument 
from design. I believe that, so far as I have carried it this 
morning, they are right. This, however, does not preclude 
that which I spoke of last Sunday as an indication of an 
eternal, ever-unfolding purpose running through the ages. 
By purpose, I only mean that which to us looks like pur- 
pose, and corresponds to our intelligence. 

Another reason why they tell us we cannot know anything 
about God is based on what, so far as I know, is now 
universally accepted as a fundamental principle in modern 
science; that is, the "relativity of knowledge." What do I 
mean by that ? Simply this, — that we have found out that 
we cannot know anything except as it is related to us. I do 
not know what this book is "in itself." I touch it, and it 
feels hard. I look at it, and it appears square and of a 
brownish color. I strike it on the desk, and I hear a sound. 
If I should taste it, I should find a flavor in the paper or ink 
or leather of which it is made. It manifests itself to me 
through all these different senses. But what it is beyond 
that, or whether it is anything beyond that, I do not know. 
My knowledge of it is purely relative, relative to my faculties 
of perception. And so they say that here is a limit beyond 
which no man can pass. Thus, we can never know what this 
great Being about which we are speaking is in itself or him- 
self. We can only know phenomena, manifestations of life, 



52 God. 

as they are related to our faculties of perception. There- 
fore, they say, — and the conclusion seems to be very rational 
and logical, — since we can never know anything of this in- 
finite and eternal essence, if such there be, let us confine 
ourselves to the possible and the practical. I agree with 
them. Let us confine ourselves to that which is possible 
and practical. But will some one please to tell me what is 
possible and what may be practical in its application to our 
human life ? That man, that nation, which has ever done 
anything in the world from the beginning until now, has been 
the one that has earnestly believed in the possibility of the 
impossible. No nation ever was great, no man ever was 
great, who had the word " impossible " in his dictionary. Is 
there anything impossible ? You may tell the navigator, the 
student, the scientific man of the world, as long as you will, 
that they can never reach the north pole, and that, if they 
could, it would do no good. But men have always been 
knocking at the icy door of the Arctic, and they are knock- 
ing there to-day. And, in spite of all your wise advice, they 
will knock there until it opens. A north-west passage or a 
north-east passage, or a passage over the ice fields, will be 
found. For it is the most glorious quality of this human 
nature of ours that it will not admit that any door cannot be 
opened. It believes with all its heart that which Jesus has 
said, " Knock, and it shall be opened." It has knocked, and 
it will knock, and it will knock forever. Impossible ! Why, 
a thousand things that were once impossible are of every-day 
occurrence now. It was once impossible to build a ship to 
sail over the seas ; but it was done. It was impossible that 
this little puffing breath of steam should enable men to con- 
trol their ships so as to sail right in the teeth of the wind 
and the tide, and defy the storms, — impossible to do this ; 
but it was done. It was impossible to construct railroads so 



Can We Know Him ? 53 

that they should bridge the rivers and tunnel the mountains 
and reach from one end of the earth to the other, — impossi- 
ble, all men said, except a few dreamers \ but it was done. 
And what is there that is impractical ? What is there that is 
of no use for man to know ? No one has knowledge pro- 
found enough to say of anything, There is no use in study- 
ing that. There have been those who would take astron- 
omy from the schools and confine our attention simply to 
this world. But the stars themselves are the guides of 
men in sailing the oceans of the world. These far-off and 
once inaccessible powers and forces of the universe are 
to-day the common ministers to the wants of man. What 
was the use of Franklin's going out with his kite, and trying 
to see if he could tease the lightning to come down out of 
the cloud and perch upon his hand ? Suppose he could, 
what of it ? A mere piece of curiosity ! And yet has not 
the result of that purely speculative scientific curiosity 
changed the face of the world, and given us a new type of 
civilization ? And this marvellous power that flashed and 
leaped with its terrible joy, from storm-cloud to storm-cloud, 
has become an every-day servant, a common minister to the 
every-day man of the world. 

There is nothing that the world will believe to be im- 
possible. There is nothing that the world will believe may 
not be turned to practical account. And I, for one, am not 
ready to admit that a knowledge of God, if it can be found, 
is of no practical value to the world. You know well enough 
that I do not believe that a knowledge of God would change 
the standards of our daily living. I believe the principles of 
morality have been developed by the social life and experi- 
ence of man • and, whether there is a God or is not, truth 
and right, and purity and justice, and goodness, and all 
these moral qualities of the world, remain the same. And 



54 God. 

yet a belief in God, even in the sphere of morals, would be 
the most intensely practical thing of which the world could 
conceive. I will do the best I can, if I know I shall die 
to-morrow. I will do justice ; I will try to help those that are 
needy \ I will do all I can to make the world happy and good, 
whether I am to live in the future or not, whether there is a 
God in the heaven that will care or not. But suppose I know 
that there is intelligence and love in the deeps of the infinite 
above me ; that I am the child of God, and that he cares what 
I do, whether I do or do not these things that I know are 
right ; that he watches the burdens that I carry ; that he 
knows the sighs and sufferings of my heart, the temptations 
that beset me ; that he understands the struggle through 
which I pass, — no matter whether he touches my burden by 
the lightest weight of a finger ; no matter whether he clears 
off the cloud that makes it dark before my way ; no matter 
whether he does anything except sit there silent, — if I know 
the intelligence and the love are there, it becomes the mighti- 
est mainspring and motive of life of which it is possible to 
conceive. It does not change our standards ; but it does put 
a deeper meaning, an infinite meaning, into life. I believe 
then that the world will try to find out about God. You may 
prove to them just as often as you please that it is useless, 
and that, if it were not useless, it would be utterly impossible: 
still, the world will never give up the quest. Let us then turn 
and look it in the face for a little while. 

In the first place, let us raise the question as to what instru- 
ments of research are in our hands. By what method shall 
we seek to find out God ? Have we any faculties adequate 
to such an endless quest? I believe that there is only one 
method of knowledge in the universe, whether the object of 
that knowledge be God or man or fossil, whether it be duty 
or the knowledge of a flower, whether it be in the heavens 



Can We Know Him ? 55 

above or in the earth beneath or in the depths under the 
earth. There is only one possible method of knowledge 
and that is the method of science. What do we mean by 
science? Not merely a knowledge of animals, of trees, of 
mountains, of fossil bones, of stars, — not that alone which is 
called physical knowledge. Science is a method \ and it 
applies to every possible phase of knowledge with equal 
propriety and force. It means observation, verification, com- 
parison, putting the things we have observed and verified 
together. Then, if we can discover the links that bind our 
phenomena in one, we shall have a philosophy of science. 
I believe this is the only method by which we can seek and 
find God, or anything else in the universe. 

Now let us glance over a few of the other methods that are 
proposed, and see if they do not come within the scope of 
this. For example, they tell us that miracles have occurred, 
and that these prove the existence of God and manifest the 
qualities of his character. If miracles have occurred, they 
are facts to be observed, to be proved, to be estimated as to 
their quality and value. So they come within the scope of 
the scientific method equally with anything else. 

They tell us that God has given us a revelation of himself 
in a book. I for one cannot accept this statement as true. 
I remember a gentleman who, on a certain occasion, said 
he did not believe in ghosts, because he had " seen too many 
of them." I cannot believe in revelations, because I have 
seen too many of them. Which one shall we believe, the 
revelation of our religion or of some other man's religion ? 
There are at least a half-dozen great books in the world that 
claim to be the direct gift of God. But suppose God has 
given us a book. Then this book is a fact, a reality, some- 
thing to be observed, to be verified, to be estimated as to its 
quality and value. It comes then within the scope of the 
scientific method. 



$6 God. 

Again, they tell us that we must know God by faith. 
What do they mean ? Faith is not credulity. It is not be- 
lieving a thing without any evidence. If it is, it is unworthy 
of a rational man. Faith, — what is it ? What do I mean 
when I say I have faith in a fellow-man ? I mean that I 
know something of that man, his character, his career, his 
conduct in the past, his capacity, so that I believe in him 
as to what he will do in the future, what he is capable of 
achieving. I have faith in him. If faith means anything 
rational and worthy, it is based on the result of knowledge 
and experience in the past, and is simply an assertion as to 
what we believe will occur in a new set of circumstances 
similar to those with which we are already familiar. Sup- 
pose I say I have faith in God, — and, friends, I have, and 
I believe it is rational, I believe it is justifiable, — what 
do I mean ? I believe that the experience of the past 
history of humanity has given us reason to have faith in 
to-morrow. I stand facing the unknown ; and I say, I be- 
lieve, I trust. And I walk forward into the cloud, though 
I cannot see the next step before my feet. If there is no 
past experience of humanity justifying a faith like this, then 
it is sheer madness, it is an impulse of insanity, and not 
of reason. Faith, then, — what is it ? It is the result of the 
past experience of the world ; it is facing the unknown, and 
trusting it on the basis of that past experience. The foun- 
dations, then, of this faith, are objects of knowledge, of ob- 
servation, of experiment, of scientific verification and proof. 
So faith itself, then, comes within the scope and limits of this 
scientific method. 

Men tell us about heart-knowledge, — I hear it perpetually 
in ministerial conferences and from the pulpit, — they tell 
us we must know God not through the head, but through the 
heart. What do they mean ? I can find no meaning in it 



Can We Know Him ? 57 

save this : that, if I am to know another being who nves or 
has feeling, I must come into contact with that being through 
sympathy. This heart-knowledge, this sympathy, then, is 
simply a sort of sixth sense, another perceptive power, a 
faculty by which I reach out and come into contact with 
some other being or power or life around me. I take 
Shakespeare in my hand, and I say, I cannot understand 
Shakespeare, except as I have the poetic quality in my 
nature that brings me into sympathy with him. True. This 
sympathy becomes a faculty by which I perceive the quali- 
ties of Shakespeare that I would not perceive, if I did not 
have the sympathy. And precisely the same thing is true 
of anything else. Take the case of one of my senses. If 
I had no sense of touch, I might have the sense of sight, 
taste, hearing, and smell, but I could come into relation 
with only a part of what I say makes up this book which I 
hold. I can only come into relation with those parts of it 
for which I have the proper perceptive faculties. I can 
know God then, I can know something of the grandeur of 
the world, only as there is in me a sympathy that reaches 
out and comes into contact with these facts and qualities 
of the world about me. But, when the heart has felt, that 
feeling is a fact : it is a fact to be observed just as much 
as the fossil itself. It is a fact to be intellectually esti- 
mated and weighed and assigned its place. So this heart- 
knowledge, this sympathy, comes also within the scope and 
limits of the scientific method. 

Theodore Parker was the great theological representative 
in this country of what is called Transcendentalism, the in- 
tuitional method. But science has explained intuition. It 
is the result of human experience ; and, in so far as a man's 
intuitions are justifiable, they are a part also of the scientific 
method. 



58 God. 

Professor Max Mtiller, of London, tells us that he believes 
that man has a direct perception of the infinite. Granted. 
I believe he has. But this perception again is the percep- 
tion of a reality. And so through whatever avenue of the 
mind I go out and come into contact with the world around 
me, when I have come into contact with it, I have found a 
reality, a fact, a something to be perceived, to be observed, 
to be verified, to be dwelt with intellectually according to its 
value. The scientific method, then, is the only method by 
which anything in the heavens above or the earth beneath 
can be known. 

I come now to that which is the crucial part of my discus- 
sion, that to which the points I have been taking up thus far 
are only steps. With this scientific method in my hands now, 
can I really know God ? That is the great question that I wish 
now suggestively and as briefly as possible to answer. You 
are more or less familiar with the doctrine, which has become 
famous in these modern days, of the " Unknowable." It is 
chiefly connected with the name of Herbert Spencer. He 
teaches that God is unknown, and must be forever unknown. 
But he does not teach it with any more emphasis than does 
the Bible. " Canst thou by searching find out God ? " " It is 
high as heaven, what canst thou do ? deeper than the abyss, 
what canst thou know?" "No man hath seen God at any 
time." He is the infinite, forever eluding us, always beyond. 
But, now, what precisely does Herbert Spencer mean by his 
doctrine of the Unknowable ? We will see, then, whether it 
precludes the possibility of all knowledge. He says that 
knowledge is only a process of classification. Let me illus- 
trate, following his suggestion, but not literally quoting him. 
Suppose I am walking out in a field. The wind does not blow, 
and the air is still ; but, in spite of this fact, I see the tall grass 
moving at a distance. I say, There is something alive. I class 



Can We Know Him ? 59 

that motion with other motions that indicate life ; and I feel 
that some living thing is the cause of that motion. I walk 
on, and soon a dog springs up out of the grass and runs 
across the field. What do I mean when I call it a dog ? I 
have not explained anything. I have merely classed that 
particular dog with all the other members of the species that 
go under that name. I get near enough to him, and I say, It 
is a Newfoundland dog. I have completed another process 
of classification. Not only a dog, but I have narrowed the 
range of my thought to a particular kind of dog. Then, as I 
get nearer to him, and make a closer examination, I know 
of what color he is, whether black or white or a mixture of 
the two. And so I may proceed as far as I please ; but all 
the time I am only carrying on a process of classification. 
Herbert Spencer tells us that this is what we mean by knowl- 
edge. Why cannot we know God then? Why? For the 
simple reason that God is one, unique, unlike anything else 
in the universe, — the one, the infinite, the eternal. Of course 
there is no possibility of classifying Him, since there is no 
second with whom he can be compared. That is the famous 
doctrine of the Unknowable. With this definition of knowl- 
edge, are we not all compelled to accept the conclusion ? 

But now does that preclude the possibility of knowledge ? 
Let us see if the same difficulty does not apply to any thing 
else in the world. Take the case of my nearest and dearest 
friend. I do not know what that friend is "in himself." I 
know first the clothes he is accustomed to wear, his external 
appearance ; his look, the tone of his voice. I get acquainted 
by conversation with the type of his thought and the extent 
of his intelligence. I gef familiar after long association 
with the kind of character that he bears. But all the time 
I simply know certain manifestations that he makes of him- 
self to me. I do not know him completely, and I never can 



60 God. 

know him completely. I do not know what he is in essence. 
So I may take a flower, and precisely the same truth holds 
here. Take this rose that I hold in my hand. I do not know 
it completely, I cannot know it completely. I smell it, and 
know its fragrance. I touch it, and know the feeling of stem 
or leaf. I look at it, and know its color. But we know per- 
fectly well that our senses do not exhaust the universe. We 
know there are millions and millions of air-waves that do not 
translate themselves to our ear as sound. We know there are 
other millions of other waves that do not transmit themselves 
to our eyes as light. And we have reason to believe that the 
universe is infinite above and beneath and beyond us on 
every hand, forever eluding us ; for the simple reason that 
we have no adequate faculties to bring ourselves into con- 
tact with it all. If I could know this flower, if I could know 
it completely, I should know everything. You remember 
those famous words of Tennyson : — 

" Flower in the crannied wall, 
I pluck you out of the crannies ; — 
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 
Little flower, — but if I could understand 
What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
I should know what God and man is." 

The universe is all one piece. I catch hold of some loose 
thread of this infinite garment of God, — that is forever 
being woven, and is never done, — and it leads me face to 
face with the Infinite. It starts a question that no man can 
answer. Precisely this same quality of the Unknowable, 
then, attaches itself to the most commonplace thing of life, 
I can only know certain manifestations. I can know noth- 
ing in ifs essence. It is just as true of my book, or my coat, 
or my friend, or this flower, as it is of God. 

There is another thing that they warn us against, that I 



Can We Know Him ? 61 

must speak of, in order to complete my thought. They tell 
us we must beware of that long word, anthropomorphism. 
What do they mean ? It is that we are in perpetual danger 
of thinking of God as though he was like ourselves. That 
is, — to illustrate what I mean, — I have no right to say that 
God plans, without explaining that word. Why ? Why, when 
a man plans something, it means that he thinks out a prob- 
lem that he does not know as yet. He overcomes certain 
difficulties that are in his way. We cannot conceive of any 
problem that the Infinite does not know, so that he has to 
plan or think it out. There are no difficulties that the Infi- 
nite has to overcome. Of course, it is not proper for us, in 
that sense of the word, to speak of God as planning. We 
cannot speak of God as thinking, in the same sense in which 
we think ; for all that we know about thinking is connected 
with certain processes and movements of the human brain. 
Unless God has a brain, he does not think as man thinks. 
And yet, if we are not anthropomorphic, if we do not speak 
in symbolical language, derived from human thought and 
human experience, we shall never be able to speak at all. 
We are just as anthropomorphic about other things as about 
God. We talk of the sky as frowning or smiling. We talk of 
the waves on the seashore as sobbing or the wind as sigh- 
ing. We talk of the sun as rising and as setting. We talk 
about the universe, in every direction, in this symbolical 
language ; and nobody says we must not use such speech 
about the daily facts of life. Nobody is in danger of being 
mistaken; for we know, in the natural world, that we are 
able only to symbolize the reality. I do not know how we 
can help being anthropomorphic concerning God. I am 
certainly nearer the truth when I say God thinks than when 
I say he does not think ; although, when I say he thinks, I 
cannot mean that he thinks in the same way as I do. If I 



62 God. 

say God loves, I can hardly mean that he loves in the same 
sense, precisely, in which I love. And yet we must not 
think of God as something less than thought, less than pur- 
pose, less than love, but as something infinite, transcending 
all these modes of speech and life with which we are fa- 
miliar. We must be anthropomorphic, then ; and there is no 
harm in it, if we only remember that language, in every di- 
rection, is but a symbol, and an inadequate symbol at that ; 
and that, when we put our thought into speech, we have only 
outlined shadows and reflections that are not adequate to 
express the reality. 

Now, I am prepared to say, in the face of all that the 
modern world knows, and in spite of all the difficulties that 
we have been considering, that we may know God, and that 
we do know God, in precisely the same sense in which we 
may know and do know anything else whatsoever. I may 
know God just as I may know my friend. I may know him 
just as truly, just as really, and, I say again, in precisely 
the same way. The only difference is a difference of degree, 
not at all a difference in kind. I can know more of my 
friend because he is on my level ; and the finite can never 
exhaust the infinite. Now, to say in a word just what I 
mean by this statement, — that may seem to many of you 
irrational and startling — all I know of any of you, of this 
flower, this desk, this table, this platform, all I know of 
these windows through which the light streams in, all I 
know of the sun, all I know of the earth beneath my feet, 
all I know of anything, is certain manifestations of these 
that come to me through my senses and perceptions. I 
do not know what they are in themselves, and never can 
know. 

Now, the one thing, scientific men tell us, that we know 
more certainly than we know anything else outside the limits 



Can We Know Him ? 63 

of our own consciousness, is the existence of this power and 
life back of and manifesting itself through the phenomena of 
the world. I know these manifestations ; I study them, I 
compare them • I verify them \ I classify them ; and, instead 
of saying that we know nothing about God, I believe it is per- 
fectly proper for us to say that we k?iow nothing else but God. 
For everything in the universe is simply so for a manifesta- 
tion of this infinite power and life that we call God. 

Just one word more : we are in the midst of mystery, a 
mystery that we shall never be able completely to penetrate. 
This is something that grows out of the nature of things, 
a necessity, and — as I shall show you in just one moment — 
a blessing. Suppose I am standing on the deck of a ship in 
mid-Atlantic some foggy morning. Perhaps I cannot see 
more than ten feet away from me in any direction. I see 
dim shadows, outlines of a few things just in the edge of 
the mist. I have a very small realm, and I can know a good 
deal about it : I can know it quite completely, because it is 
small. But, as the sun rises, the fog lifts. The circle of the 
visible enlarges, until by and by the whole ship stands out 
clear against the sky, and the fog is lifted from all the sea. 
I can see clear to the horizon, miles on miles of waves lifting 
and sinking, and other ships passing to and fro from differ- 
ent ports of the earth. The world of the known and the 
visible is increased and widened. So also, and by this same 
process, the world of the unknown and the invisible is in- 
creased ; until just as I know a great deal more and can see 
a great deal more than I did before, so there is a wider cir- 
cle beyond which I cannot see and cannot know. Suppose I 
am standing in a valley, at the foot of a mountain. I can see 
only a little around me, and I can understand it very well. 
I begin to climb up the mountain-side. My horizon widens 
on every hand, and by the time I am on the summit the 



64 God. 

world is at my feet. I see more, but the wall of the un- 
known is also widened, and extends beyond me on every 
hand. 

I take a glass, and sweep the skies above my head. 
Though my eyes travel for millions and millions of miles, 
there only grows on me the sense of worlds forever and 
forever beyond, eluding me at every advance, things which 
I can never know. 

So we may study and travel for eternity, and the mystery 
of the universe will only deepen at every step ; for every- 
thing we shall ever learn will only broaden the horizon of 
that which is beyond us. Is this thought oppressive ? It is 
the only hope for man. If the universe were small, and my 
brain, my capacity of thought and investigation, were small, 
corresponding to the size of the little universe, I might study 
it and look it all through, and then — despair ! The end 
reached, nothing more to think about, nothing more to live 
for! This would be the death of the world. If I could 
exhaust infinity, I should merely be reading my own death 
warrant. Immortality would be an absurdity, ev r en as a 
thought, to a man who could read clear through the nature 
of things. But, just because we are finite, just because this 
is an infinite universe, we may take the wings of the morn- 
ing and fly to the uttermost parts of the sea, we may leap 
from world to world through an infinity of space, and still 
infinity is beyond ; new fields, grand careers, avenues un- 
entered inviting us on every hand. Thus, it is rational to 
dream that we may study and think and live and love for- 
ever ! And the universe, around us, beneath us, above us, 
grander and grander still and ever inviting us on, may still 
open before us infinities and eternities unattainable beyond. 



Is God Conscious, Personal, and Good? 



We are, I trust, by this time convinced that God is, that 
he is eternal, infinite, almighty • that by the method of sci- 
ence, — the only adequate method of human research with 
which we are acquainted, — we may rationally investigate 
and hope to know something of his methods, his ways, 
his manifestations throughout the universe, and in the life, 
character, and history of man. But we want to know some- 
thing more than this. The one great thing, it seems to me, 
for which our human hearts hunger, is to know, not whether we 
are dealing with omnipotence, infinity, eternity, but whether 
we are dealing with thought, with a heart. Is it an infinite 
and almighty and at the same time a deaf and blind and 
heartless giant with which, like Jacob in the darkness, we 
wrestle and struggle throughout the long night of our human 
career ? If so, then we inevitably fight a losing battle. How- 
ever successful it may seem to be for a time, however we 
may conquer these mighty, dead, blind forces, and for a 
while make them serve us, still, day by day, week by week, 
year by year, this mighty power is getting the better of us. 
We are growing older and weaker ; our physical and mental 
powers are gradually waning and wasting ; and, do what we 
will, the giant will throw us at the last : our feet will slip, 
and we shall fall into that dark and fathomless abyss that we 
call the grave. I say what we want to know is whether we 



66 God. 

must take this view of life, — for we must take it, if God be 
not conscious, as much as personal, and loving, — or may we 
feel that, though we are compelled, for reasons as yet at least 
partially inscrutable, to carry burdens that chafe our shoul- 
ders and crush our hearts, there is some one in the universe 
that cares ? When our hearts sigh in the midst of their 
sorrow, may we believe that there is sympathy outside that 
notices that sigh ? When our hearts ache, may we believe 
that there is somebody wmo notices that they ache, some- 
body who cares that they ache, somebody who would lift 
off the burden and assuage the pain, were there not some 
grander, deeper reason that urges silence and waiting until 
the result of the sorrow be achieved? This, then, is the 
question : Does God think, does God care, does God love ; 
or are we dealing with forces mightier than we, that we are 
compelled to think of as heartless, and to which we may 
cry in vain as long as we will, because they are deaf and 
unconscious ? 

You will remember that, in the last sermon of this course, 
on Agnosticism, I dealt with the question of our being an- 
thropomorphic ; that is, of our being compelled to speak 
of God and of all things in the world in language drawn 
from human thought and human experience. That is, I said, 
if we speak of God as planning, w r e cannot mean that he 
plans in the same sense that we do, — recognizing difficulties, 
and devising means by which he may overcome them. This 
is a figurative way of speaking, drawn from human experi- 
ence. I said we were anthropomorphic, whether we were 
speaking of God, or whether we were speaking of a flower or 
a grain of sand or a star. We cannot help being anthropo- 
morphic, until we can escape the limitations of our nature. 
I shall speak, then, anthropomorphically to-day, claiming not 
only the right, but asserting the necessity of this use of Ian- 



Is He Conscious, Personal, and Good? 67 

guage, — only asking you to remember what I called your 
attention to then, that we must not for one moment forget 
that all our language is, and of necessity must be, symbolic. 
It does not express the absolute, the complete, the final 
truth, when we speak of the infinite \ for our language is 
finite. Our words are coined and minted in human experi- 
ence and human observation. Finite words cannot be com- 
pletely true, when we are dealing with these great themes. 
And yet remember this : although it may not be philosophi- 
cally accurate for me to say God thinks, because thinking, 
with us, is connected with the human brain , for me to say 
God feels, for feeling, with us, is connected with a system of 
nerves ; that God loves, for love is strictly a human experi- 
ence, as we understand the word, — though it may not be 
scientifically correct for us to use these terms, yet they are 
the best terms, indeed, the only terms, we have ; and we 
must either use these, or keep silent. We may remember, 
however, that, when we say God thinks, God feels, God 
loves, we are not overstating the reality, but infinitely under- 
tating it. We are using a human shadow to express a divine 
reality, and we know that the reality infinitely transcends the 
shadow. With this explanation, then, I shall go on and fear- 
lessly speak in these terms of human thought and human 
feeling, asking you to make due allowance wherever such 
terms occur. 

Our first question, then, is as to whether God may be 
rightly thought of by us as a conscious being. It may seem 
strange to some of you that such a point as this should ever 
be raised. And yet it is one of the great philosophical ques- 
tions of the world at the present time, over which the keenest 
intellects are striving. Hartmann, the prince of pessimists, 
that great German philosopher, the principle of whose system 
is that this is the worst possible kind of a universe that could 



68 God. 

be conceived, — Hartmann goes on at length and elaborately, 
by the use of scientific facts and arguments, to demonstrate 
that God is a being who thinks and who wills. But it is also 
the fundamental principle of his system that this great think- 
ing and willing being is unconscious. So his philosophy goes 
by this name : it is " The Philosophy of the Unconscious. " 
He believes that God thinks and wills, and that he has ar- 
ranged all this universe, but has done it like a giant in a 
dream, absolutely unconscious all the time as to what he was 
about. But the point that I wish to call your attention to, and 
that which has led me to mention him at all, is this : that he 
has scientifically demonstrated that there is will and intellect 
manifest in the universe. I want to spend just a moment 
over these two points, and then let you see what bearing they 
have on the question of consciousness. 

Is there any manifestation of will in the universe ? There 
is, at any rate, what Matthew Arnold calls a " stream of 
tendency." The universe, from the first beginning of it that 
we can trace until now, has pursued a definite and intelligent 
line of movement, as though, at any rate, there was a will 
manifested in and propelling the entire course of universal 
progress. What do we mean when we speak of will as con- 
nected with a man ? How do I know, for example, that any 
of you will to do a certain thing ? If we have not thought a 
great deal about it, perhaps we are accustomed to suppose 
that there is some independent power in us that goes by the 
name of will, something that sits on a little throne, something 
that controls the movement of the hand, the foot, the thought. 
But, if you will only give it a little calm consideration for a 
moment, you will see that all we mean by it, all we possibly 
can mean, is that the man wills to do that which he does, 
wills to think that which he really thinks, and wills to accom- 
plish that which he strives after. That is, the will is simply 



Is He Conscious, Personal, and Good? 69 

the resultant of all the forces that make up the being. If we 
stand by the bank of a river, we see it flowing in a certain 
direction, north or south. There are eddies, counter-currents 
and curves and turnings of the river, but on the whole it 
sweeps with its whole force in a certain direction. So we 
may observe concerning a man ; may observe, as we think, 
concerning the operations of our own consciousness. There 
are eddies, there are counter-currents, there are conflicting 
interests and desires ; but at last we will. What do we mean ? 
We mean that the resultant of all these influences and forces 
is that we move in a certain direction. That is all we mean 
by will. It is all we can mean in an intelligent use of 
language. Now look over the universe, look over human 
history, look over all that we know concerning this wonder- 
ful world, and we see everywhere from first to last the sweep 
of tendency, this intelligible motion onward. And we have 
precisely the same right to assert of this the existence of will 
that we have to say that will exists in the heart or the brain 
of any one of our fellow-men. Will, then, or that which cor- 
responds to it in man, is demonstrable as a fact, an eternal 
reality in the universe. 

Does intelligence exist in the universe also ? Again, what 
do we mean by intelligence, when we are speaking of its 
manifestation in men? I cannot get at the movements of 
my brain to know what intelligence may be in its essence, 
whether it is essentially connected with the brain or not ; 
and, if I cannot reach it in my own case, much more I can- 
not reach it in any of you. What do I mean then, when I 
say that Mr. A. or Mr. B. is an intelligent man ? I mean 
simply this : that his words and actions correspond to what 
I call the logical and rational order of my thought. That is 
all I mean, that is all I can mean. If they do not thus corre- 
spond, what do I say of him ? I say he is odd, he is eccen- 



70 God. 

trie, he is irrational, perhaps insane or an idiot. What do I 
mean by these words again ? I mean only that his words 
and his actions do not correspond to the logical and rational 
order of my thinking. All I know then of human intelli- 
gence outside of myself is just this, — the force of which I 
wish you to carefully note, — that the words and actions of 
people outside of me do correspond to the logical and 
rational order of my own thought. Now, then, I look abroad 
over the universe, over its past history and its present con- 
dition, and do I not see everywhere a most stupendous order, 
— from the chemical constituents, and their relations, that 
make up a drop of water ; from the orderly arrangement of 
leaves upon the branch of a tree \ from the marvellous and 
inflexible order and arrangement of the parts that make up a 
crystal ; clear up to the sweep of stars and constellations 
over my head, — everywhere a stupendous, an infinite, a majes- 
tic order, a movement that corresponds, just so far as I can 
rise to the magnificent idea of it, to the logical and rational 
order of my thought ? If, then, I have a right to say that 
man is intelligent, I have an infinitely grander right to say 
that there is intelligence, or that which transcends what we 
mean by that word, in the universe. 

God, then, wills. God, then, is an intelligent being. 
And I have a perfect scientific, demonstrable right to use 
these words concerning God in the only sense that they have 
in the dictionary, in the only way in which they are properly 
used concerning our fellow-men. Now, then, if there be 
intelligence and will in the universe, have I not a right to 
say that this intelligence and this will are conscious ? No 
man has ever yet known anything of the existence of will 
and-intelligence as separated from consciousness. You may 
tell me, if you choose, that I walk unconsciously, that I per- 
form half the actions of my life unconsciously, and that these 



Is He Conscious, Personal, and Good? yi 

actions betray intelligence. You may tell me, if you choose, 
of well-authenticated cases of men composing in their sleep, 
as did Coleridge, and making a beautiful poem unconsciously; 
or of another man's rising in his sleep, and working out some 
deep mathematical problem unconsciously. I grant it all; 
but all these cases are simply the result of habit. In the 
first instance, the work was conscious. In the first instance, 
the poetic composition was conscious. The work of apply- 
ing mathematical principles was conscious work. They are 
unconscious simply as the result of habit. But, in the first 
instance, all the activities of man, all the activities of which 
we know anything, — 'intelligence and will, — are conscious 
activities. And, if we reason — as alone we have the right 
to reason — from the known to the unknown, wherever we 
find intelligence, wherever we find will, we are forced by the 
logic of our own reason, as far as our knowledge extends, to 
assert also that this will and this intelligence are conscious. 
For lack of time, then, to elaborate further, I leave my 
first point here. I believe, that carefully considered, these 
thoughts that I have urged are scientific demonstrations 
that God is a conscious being. 

Now, then, is he personal ? That which I have already 
been saying bears largely on the solution of this new prob- 
lem. And yet there are certain things about it that I must 
take up and look at by themselves. In the first place, we 
must do what, if more frequently done, would make a good 
many questions clearer than they are : we must settle a 
definition. What do we mean when we talk about person- 
ality ? Is it not true that what people really are anxious to 
know when they are discussing the question of the personal- 
ity of God is that he thinks, that he loves, that he cares ? 
That is what they mean, is it not ? 

Now, then, let us look at this word " personality " and see 



72 God. 

what its significance is. Of course, God is not personal in 
the sense in which we use that word in our sitting-rooms and 
on the street every day. We say, There goes such a per- 
son along the street : what do we mean ? Why, there is a 
being outlined, having a definite form and shape, occupying 
a specific locality in space ; a being who, in his personality, 
is subject to all conceivable limitations ; a being who is 
sick, who suffers, who hopes, who fears, who is pained, who 
is troubled ; a being who by and by must die. All those 
elements go to make up the meaning of the word " personal- 
ity " as used on the street. Certainly, we cannot think for a 
moment that we are to attribute these characteristics to God. 
God is not a person in the sense in which we are accus- 
tomed to use that word. 

Now, where does this word " personal " come from ? It is 
derived from an old Latin word, which originally stood for 
the mask of an actor. In the old Greek and Roman thea- 
tres, an actor always wore a mask, which represented the 
character he was to assume; and this mask was called per- 
sona, the personality that could be put on and taken off. 
Open Shakspere, and you will find at the head of the plays 
the words Dramatis Personae, persons of the drama. The 
word originated then here. It is the character or part which 
the actor assumes at a particular time or place, which first 
bore the name "person." But we do not mean that by it 
now ; and, if we are to keep that old meaning, then we must 
think of God not as unipersonal or tripersonal, but multiper- 
sonal. For, whenever God manifests himself in any way or 
form, whatever mask he may assume in the heavens above 
or the earth beneath, this manifestation becomes a person- 
ality in the original meaning of the word. 

But though we are not at liberty to say that God is per- 
sonal, as we are accustomed to define the term, yet — mark 



Is He Conscious, Personal, and Good? 73 

this, for the whole discussion hinges on this one thought — 
we are not at liberty, in denying God's personality, either 
to say or to think that he is something less than personal. 
Suppose I close the shutter of my study window, and only let 
a little, tiny, white ray of light come through. Then, I take 
a prism in my hand, and I split up this ray into the various 
colored parts of which it is composed. I fix upon the red. 
Have I a right to say that the ray of light is red ? No. It 
is white. And I assert that which is untrue, if I fix upon 
any one of its specific colors, and say that that represents the 
totality of the ray. But I assert an equal untruth, if I say 
that this white ray does not contain in itself the possibility 
and potency of the red ray. It is not less than red : it is 
more ; for it contains all the colors of the spectrum. So, 
when I see personality in myself or you, manifested as one 
part and outcome of the infinite life of things, I have no 
right to scy that this personality represents the totality of 
that life. Neither have I a right to say that the totality of 
that life is not as much as I am. It is infinitely more. So, 
when I deny personality as an attribute of God, I am not 
belittling him, I am not taking away something from him, I 
am not making him smaller and less in dignity and goodness 
and glory: I am only asserting that personality is a little, 
feeble, finite, limited word, that cannot sum up the infinite 
capacity of God. God is unspeakably more than personal. 
Personality is one of his local, finite manifestations. But is 
the infinite, that manifests itself as personal, less than its own 
manifestation ? God is unspeakably more than we mean by 
that word then, while he holds in himself all that is sweet 
and gracious and tender and hopeful and helpful, — more 
than that word is accustomed in our thought and speech to 
cover. 

One more thought only on this question of personality. 



74 God. 

What is the essence, the essential idea, of personality ? It is 
not outline, it is not limitation, it is not location in space. A 
rock or a tree is outlined, shaped, located at a particular point. 
I never think of calling it a person. Why ? It lacks that 
which is really central in our thought as supplying personality. 
It lacks consciousness, it lacks intelligence, it lacks selfhood. 
John Locke, the English philosopher, says that the central 
idea of personality is thought and intelligence. Hermann 
Lotze, one of the foremost scientific philosophers of the 
world, asserts the same. Conscious selfhood, he says, is 
the essence of personality. And so we may assert and be- 
lieve that God is personal, while we eliminate from the defi- 
nition of that word all that limits, all that locates, all that 
cripples, all that hampers personality, as we are acquainted 
with it in ourselves and in each other. And we may rightly, 
I believe, — carefully defining terms and understanding what 
they mean, — assert of God that he is the Infinite Person. 
Now then, passing this question with this necessary brevity 
and condensation, and yet covering, I believe, all that is 
essential, I pass to the third and last point that I shall now 
offer for your consideration. 

Is God good ? If he is not, he is not God. Prove what- 
ever else you may concerning him, if we cannot trust him, if 
we cannot love him, if we cannot put our hand into his, 
though his is hidden in a cloud, and walk by his side like a 
little child by the side of his father in the dark, believing that, 
though we do not know where we are going, he does, — if, I 
say, we cannot believe that, then for all practical purposes, 
for our hearts and our hopes, there is no God. Good ? What 
do we mean by that word ? What I mean and what I believe 
the world is coming rapidly to mean, what the world must 
mean, is this : God, if he be anything, is king over all things, 
blessed forever. No definition of him can mean anything to 



Is He Conscious, Personal, and Good? 75 

us, as being good, unless it means, some time, some when, 
some where, an outcome of good for every being that thinks 
and breathes. And so I assert, without fear of contradiction, 
that in the popular churches of the day God is not defined as 
a good being. Assert it loudly as they will, the very defini- 
tion of their theology contains in itself the elements which 
contradict the assertion, and will echo and shout that contra- 
diction in its face forever. If there is one single human soul 
that is to suffer torture forever, then God is not good. It 
implies then an outcome of good for every one of his children. 
That is what good means. 

Now, is God good ? Have we any reason, any rational 
right, to believe that he is good in so grand and so compre- 
hensive a sense as that ? What is the indictment that is 
brought against him ? I would that I might at least suggest 
to you the way by which we may "justify the ways of God 
to men." I believe with my whole soul that they are justifi- 
able. What is the indictment against God's goodness? A 
philosopher, a profound thinker, like John Stuart Mill, will 
sum up the argument for you, and say that all we have a 
right to do is to place the evils of life on one side of the 
account-book, and the good on the other, and assert that 
perhaps there is more of good in God than there is of evil ; 
and yet that there must be both, because both good and 
evil exist. That is, Mill tells us that we must either limit 
God's goodness or limit his power. Evil, he says, exists. 
Then, God does not want to get rid of it, or he cannot. 
That is his argument. If he does not want to, he is limited 
in his love or his goodness. If he cannot, he is limited in 
his power. In either case, he is not the infinite God of 
whom we are speaking. Let us, then, look at the indict- 
ment. What is it? What is it that makes men question 
whether God is good ? 



*]6 God, 

Here, for example, in human experience, are death, sick- 
ness, pain, poverty, crime, heartache, tears, all " the ills that 
flesh is heir to." These make the black indictment that 
the thought and the heart of humanity bring up against the 
goodness of God. Either defiantly, or with pain and heart- 
ache and tears, men assert : " I would not treat people in 
that fashion. No father could treat his own child as God 
treats man. He must be different from anything that we 
call loving or kind, or such things would not exist." 

Now, let us look at the problem just as carefully and as 
fearlessly as we can for a few moments. First take the one 
item, death. Is death an evil ? It may be; but do we know 
that it is an evil, so that we have a right, on the score of the 
existence of death, to assert a lack of love and wisdom and 
fatherhood on the part of God ? I dare assert, without fear 
of contradiction from any quarter, that we have no such right. 
I believe that death is not an evil, but a good. It is univer- 
sal. Some time or other, every one of us must bow and pass 
through that arched, low, dark gateway out into the beyond, 
— absolutely universal. If it be an evil, then God is a fiend ; 
for he has put this evil upon the shoulders and the heart of 
everything that breathes. But I say no man knows that it is 
an evil ; and the heart and hope and trust of the world in all 
ages have dared to assert, to believe at least, that it is a 
good, an infinite and unspeakable good. And if that whisper 
that is in every human soul tell us true, — that death only 
leads out into something better and higher, that it is a neces- 
sary step in human advance, — then it is no more an evil 
than is birth, which brought us out of the darkness into this 
wonderful light of life. And I believe that, if death came to 
us stripped of its accidents, we should never think of it as an 
evil. When we speak of death, we do not mean the simple 
act of sleep at last, with a hope of waking up in a higher and 



Is He Conscious, Personal, and Good? *]*J 

better life. That is not what the most of us mean, when we 
talk about the evil of death. It is premature death, it is 
painful death, it is horrible death, it is a death of anguish, 
a death of despair, a death of lingering torture, it is separa- 
tion, it is ten thousand things grouped about and connected 
with the fact of dissolution. If death only came to us as it 
ought to come, after a long life in which we had tasted all the 
sweets and pleasures of existence, and, like children at night, 
were tired and wanted to lie down and go to sleep ; if death 
only came to us as the leaves fall from a tree, without any 
bleeding, any pain, simply taking on their beautiful robes of 
color and falling silently through the air upon the soft bed 
of earth, — if death came like that, we should never think of 
its being an evil : it would be simply going to sleep when we 
were weary, simply stopping when we got through. And, if 
it came to us in such guise as this, the simple fact that by 
the removal of the population of the earth every few years 
to make place for new-comers whose nerves were again to 
be thrilled with the joy of life, whose glad eyes were to look 
upon the bright faces of the stars, whose hearts were to 
thrill with the music of the wind in the tree-tops and of the 
waves upon the sea-shore, whose hearts were to rejoice in 
the love of father, mother, wife, child, and friend, whose 
brains were to be busied with the great, magnificent, inspiring 
problems of life, — I say this consideration that thus gener- 
ation after generation were to come and sit down at this 
bounteous board of life, and then when they had feasted to 
sail out sleeping into the beyond, — we should say that death 
might not be an evil at all, but only a marvellous increment 
of the world's happiness, distributing that happiness to 
untold millions instead of confining it to the first-comers, a 
very few. I believe this to be the true conception of death. 
All these things that make death hideous, the horrible dreams 



78 God. 

of the beyond that frighten us, the pains and sorrows and 
lingering diseases, the mangling accidents that accompany 
and produce it, — these things, did God make them ? No, 
not one of them ! They are all preventable accompaniments 
of death, and no part of death itself, — things for which 
we, and we alone, are responsible. Death as God made it? 
and as it comes to those that live the life of God, is no more 
horrible than the falling to sleep in my arms of my little girl 
at night, as I rock her in the twilight. God's death is just 
sinking off to sleep in God's arms. 

Leaving that, then, out of the question for a moment, let 
us look at this other thing, — I shall have to group them all 
together, — pain, suffering, disease, poverty, hunger, want, 
and crime, summed up and put into one account, and that we 
call evil. And what are they? Are they things that are 
essential in the conception of this universe ? No, not one. 
They are no part of the necessary laws and life of God. 
They are every one of them simply the results of human 
ignorance and perversity breaking those laws. The universe 
in every part, in all its lawful movement and order, is one 
grand harmony, beautiful and good ; and all evil is simply 
the result of human ignorance, human passion, human per- 
versity. There is not an evil on the face of the earth that 
needs to exist. 

But still the problem is not settled yet, though we can 
assert, and assert clearly, that the universe is perfect benev- 
olence toward man. All that we call human civilization is 
simply man's finding out things that have been true forever, 
and applying them to his own use. All that we call truth is 
simply man's discovery of that which has been true from the 
beginning. They are nothing that he has created or added 
to the sum of things. All that we call the moral progress of 
the world is simply man's discovering and obeying the laws 



Is He Conscious, Personal, and Good? 79 

of his own being and the laws of the universe, that are eter- 
nal. All these tell us, prove beyond the possibility of a 
question, that the universe in itself is good, is true, is sound, 
is real, is the friend and helper of man. In every depart- 
ment of the world, in the stars above and the depths beneath 
us, the world is the storehouse of God, waiting for man to use 
it. He calls upon the lightning which had played for ages 
in the clouds, and it runs as his errand-boy. He uses the 
stars to guide his ships over the fathomless waves. He taps 
the earth, and calls out the imprisoned and imbedded sunlight 
buried there thousands of years ago, to kindle the flames in 
his grate, and to illuminate his nights in his dwellings and 
along his streets. Every mountain is a treasure-house, 
every field a store of wealth. It only needs that man ask 
intelligently for the things he needs, and this eternal over- 
flowing fulness of God is ready bountifully to supply every 
one. 

But I said a moment ago the question is not settled yet. 
Perhaps that which is the most central and important of 
them all remains. Though the universe outside of man be 
good, and though it be possible for men to live a life here 
that is free from all that we call evil, if God really loved 
man and wanted him to be happy, why did he not create 
him so that he would live rightly? There is the central, 
crucial question of all. If God is a father of love, of wis- 
dom, and wants man to be happy, why did he not create him 
so that he would be? Why did he not give him wisdom 
enough to know, at the start, everything that he has found 
out in these long and weary centuries? Why did he not give 
him power to control nature, to obey all its laws, knowledge 
to understand them all, so that he might ward off poverty 
and want and disease and pain and suffering of every kind ? 
Let us think for a moment now, and think very carefully. 



8o God. 

This resolves itself into another question, a question no less 
than this i as to which is better, that man should have 
been created an automaton, a perfect machine, or a being 
who should progressively learn things by experience. That is 
what the question means. A man can make a machine in the 
shape of a child, and so support it, this side and that, that 
it shall go through the process of walking, and never fall as 
long as it exists. A child stumbles and falls and hurts itself 
at every turn, while learning to walk. Is the machine better 
than the child, because it never stumbles or gets hurt? 
Babbage, the great mathematician, could make a " calculat- 
ing machine " that should never make a mistake in working 
out mathematical problems. Young Newton, who was to 
tower like a god of intellect over all the possible mathemat- 
ical machines that science could ever frame, blundered and 
stumbled at every turn in learning the multiplication-table, — 
the first rudiments of the figures with which he was to out- 
line the movements of the stars at the last. You go to Italy, 
and they will construct you a hand-organ so perfectly that 
it shall be incapable of making a mistake in playing a tune. 
Mozart, Beethoven, the great musicians, the master-minds of 
the world, blundered and stumbled at every step in finger- 
ing the keys with unused hands, and feeling their way out 
through the marvellous mazes and intricacies of musical law 
and sound. We can construct a machine that, using the sun, 
shall give you a perfect photograph of the face or a land- 
scape. But the artists Angelo, Titian, Rubens, the great 
artists of the world, experimented and daubed and labored 
for years before they attained the power of creating the 
masterpieces that alone are worthy to be called art. 

I say then, it is a question as to which is better : that God 
should have made man an intelligent, self-acting machine, 
never to make a mistake, never to feel hurt, never to be con- 



Is He Conscious, Personal, and Good? 8 1 

scious of wrong, never to stumble to rise again, or that he 
should make him what he is, a being learning from experience, 
progressing by attempts and trials. Which, think you, is the 
grander ? And, if man is to learn progressively by experience, 
he must perforce make mistakes, he must stumble, he must 
hurt himself against the sharp corners of things, he must over- 
step laws, and find that fire burns, that cold freezes, and that 
hunger kills. He thus learns to keep within the limits of 
these marvellous, invisible laws of life, and thus he becomes 
a free-born king, a child of God, and not a machine. iVnd 
if, friends, — and no man knows enough to deny it, — if it be 
true, as we hope and dare to believe, that man by this experi- 
ence is being fitted for a grander and larger life beyond, that 
he is to outgrow, slough off, and tread under foot the 
imperfections and faults of his being, as the child ceases to 
stumble and to make mistakes and comes to be a man ; if, 
I say, we by and by are to reach up and blossom out into 
this perfect, grand, glorious manhood, — become the sons 
and daughters of God, — then our life, however much of 
suffering or pain there is in it, is not only justified, it is 
glorified; and it stands no longer as an impeachment of 
the goodness of God ; it may be even the very crowning 
manifestation of his goodness. 

I believe then, that in the true use of language, remem- 
bering that it is symbolical and only shadows forth the infi- 
nite reality, we may say that we can rationally believe that 
God is conscious, personal, and good. And, however much 
of doubt or difficulty may still surround us, we may close 
with the song of hope which has been so beautifully sung 
by Whittier : — 

" Within the maddening maze of things, 
And tossed by storm and flood, 
To one fixed stake my spirit clings . 
/ know that God is good I " 



Why Does God not Reveal Himself? 



Our subject this morning is the question as to why God 
does not reveal himself to men, so as to set all our great 
puzzling questions at rest. Why are we left to doubt, to 
discuss, and to dispute ? Why is not everything made clear ? 

If you open any book dealing with Christian doctrine or 
Christian evidences written during the last hundred years, 
you will be quite sure to find that it starts out with the as- 
sumption that, given an intelligent, personal God, who cares 
anything about man, a revelation of himself may be confi- 
dently expected. And, since the persons who have been en- 
gaged in elaborating these schemes of doctrine and evidence 
knew of no book more likely to contain that revelation than 
the one we call the Bible, the next assumption which natu- 
rally follows is that the Bible is this revelation. Without 
stopping to take your time in dealing with this second as- 
sumption, I wish to say that I perfectly agree with the first 
one. If there be a God, intelligent, conscious, loving, our 
Father, one who cares for the race, we have a right to expect 
that he will reveal himself to us. But right here, on the 
very threshold of our discussion, there are two or three 
points that we must notice for clearness of thought and as 
bearing on the farther development of our theme. 

In the first place, it is confidently assumed by most writers 
and speakers on this subject that we may not only expect a 



Why Does He not Reveal Himself? 83 

revelation, but that we may expect and that we need an in- 
fallible revelation. Now, I wish distinctly to say that I for 
one do not believe that there is the slightest necessity for an 
infallible revelation on religious subjects any more than on 
any ether subject whatsoever; that is, unless God is a being 
who will eternally damn his own children for intellectual 
mistakes, after they have done the best they possibly can in 
the circumstances to find out the truth, — I say, unless God 
is that kind of a being, we do not need an infallible religious 
revelation any more than we need an infallible scientific or 
artistic or industrial revelation. 

Furthermore, not only do we not need an infallible reve- 
lation, but any such revelation seems to me to be an ab- 
surdity, an impossibility in the nature of things. Consider 
for a moment what it implies. It is not a question as to 
whether God can infallibly utter himself : it is a question as 
to whether fallible men can infallibly listen, infallibly inter- 
pret, infallibly report. It may be ever so infallible on the 
divine side; but, until men are something more than fallible, 
it cannot be free from error on the human side. I may utter 
myself ever so clearly to a child. The child can only take 
what the childish mind is capable of appreciating and under- 
standing. Newton may talk for a year to a North American 
Indian. The Indian cannot possibly comprehend his Prin- 
cipia; and what he does comprehend he may misinterpret. 
He may report incorrectly the next time that he tells one of 
his neighbors what Newton said to him. He may have for- 
gotten a part of it, he may have added something which was 
not in the original statement. A thousand sources of error 
are open in every direction. 

Still another point. If you will think of it, it is absurd 
and impossible in the nature of things for an infinite, bound- 
less, absolute being to reveal himself as infinite, as bound- 



84 God. 

less, as absolute, to a finite and limited nature. It is not a 
question as to whether God would like to reveal himself to 
man as he is and all he is : it is a question of possibility. 
The omnipotent cannot commit that which is absurd and 
impossible. Omnipotence itself cannot make a square with- 
out four sides to it. Omnipotence itself cannot make a 
stick without two ends. Omnipotence itself cannot make 
two mountains without a valley between them. Omnipo- 
tence cannot be absurd ; and so the infinite, I say, as infi- 
nite, cannot be revealed to the finite. Suppose a man 
attempts to reveal to me, while I am in the centre of the 
continent, the Atlantic Ocean : what will he do ? He will 
try perhaps a verbal description. But, unless I have seen 
the ocean, the words cannot mean to me what they mean 
to the speaker. Suppose he brings me a bucketful of water 
from the Atlantic : has he revealed to me the ocean ? It is 
only a bucket of water, no matter where it came from. He 
is confined by the limits of the method he uses in which to 
reveal it to me. So the infinite cannot possibly reveal itself 
as infinite to the finite. It can only manifest itself in limited, 
confined ways, with broken lights and fragmentary utterances. 
But another point. Men say, If the Bible is not infallible, 
or if something is not infallible, if we have not an infallible 
revelation somewhere, how, then, are we to know what is 
truth ? In the first place I remark, in answer to this inquiry, 
that concerning a great many things that men are very anx- 
ious to find out it does not make any special, practical 
difference whether they know what is truth or not. Con- 
cerning any question of the world that is not to-day accessi- 
ble and verifiable, it does not make any great or important 
difference whether we can find out the truth about it or not. 
Men are very much exercised over the authorship of the 
poems of Homer. It is of no great practical importance to 



Why Does He not Reveal Himself? 85 

the nineteenth century whether the man who wrote Homer 
spelled his name with five letters or with eight, whether he 
lived in one city or in another city. And I carry this princi- 
ple even so far as touching the life and doctrines of Jesus 
Christ himself. Even if it were proved to me that no such 
man as Jesus ever lived or ever spoke, it would not touch by 
the weight of a hair one of the great practical principles by 
which to-day I seek to live, and in the light of which I hope 
to die. We lay much more stress on these things that we 
cannot find out and settle than we are justified in doing. It 
would not make honesty dishonest, it would not make purity 
impure, kindness unkind. It would not touch, I say, the 
great underlying principles of your life. How do we find 
out what is true, then ? Why, we have the only means that 
any man ever had in the world, or ever will have. We find 
out what is true and what is good by the practical experi- 
ence of man. How do you find out whether a thing is white 
or black ? No one has any special difficulty in detecting the 
difference between sugar and vinegar. We can tell whether 
a thing is gold or brass. We can tell whether an object is 
beautiful or ugly. And so in regard to the great princi- 
ples of life. They have, the world over, to be tested ulti- 
mately by human experience ; and there is no other possible 
way of testing them. Those things are good that experience 
has found to be good for man : those things are evil that 
experience has found to be injurious to man. There is no 
special trouble, then, in regard to deciding what is right and 
what is wrong, what is good and what is evil. And, even 
if we had a revelation that was declared to be infallible, it 
would not help us one whit. The only w r ay by which we 
could find out ultimately as to whether the revelation was 
correct or not would be by human experience. If we bring 
a revelation to the test, this is the one final, ultimate, and 



86 God. 

only test. Men always have done it. Whether they have 
been clear in their thinking as to what they were about or 
not, they always will do it, they always must do it. 

Now, then, let us look for a moment at this question of the 
possibility of God's revealing himself to men in any one of 
the ways that have been popular in the legendary, mythologic 
thought of the world. I take it that, for the most part, men 
and women assume, without any very careful thought on the 
subject, that God might reveal himself to us infallibly and 
put these subjects beyond question, if he chose, in any one 
of a dozen ways. In order to clarify our thought, then, on 
this subject, we will look at a few of the different methods 
that have been thought about by men. And, in the first 
place, take the method of incarnation. Suppose God should 
decide to come to the world in the form of a man, could he 
in that way give us an infallible revelation of himself ? Why, 
what would he be when he got here ? They tell us in regard 
to Jesus, in order to explain the limitation of his being, 
that God shore himself of his glory, that he put off his om- 
nipotence, that he dispensed for the time being with his 
omniscience, that he humbled himself and became in the form 
of a man. Grant it for a moment. What have we then, when 
God has ceased to be God in all his fulness and complete- 
ness, for the sake of being a man ? He is not God any 
longer : he is a man. Precisely parallel to the idea that I 
spoke of a moment ago, concerning the attempt to transfer 
the Atlantic to the Mississippi Valley in a bucket. It is not 
the Atlantic : it is a bucket of water. Or, if God leaves his 
omnipotence and his infinity and his eternity, and takes on 
the limitations and form of a man, he cannot possibly by so 
doing reveal his Godhood : the utmost that he can reveal is 
the perfection of manhood, for he has become a man. There 
is, then, no revelation of God here that transcends or reaches 
beyond the limits of perfect humanity. 



Why Does He not Reveal Himself? 87 

Take another supposition. Suppose God should decide 
to infallibly inspire a prophet to reveal his will. The only 
way by which we should know that this revelation through 
the prophet was infallible would be by the test of human 
experience that I have just spoken about. If the prophet 
should say that he was infallibly inspired, it would be open 
to any man to question as to whether his testimony was valid. 
He might be perfectly honest, and still be mistaken. There 
would be no possible way that I can conceive of by which 
he should put the matter beyond question. And, even if he 
did give us a revelation, it would be only to those persons 
that received it at first hand. It would be human tradition, 
very human, possibly very faulty, as we have found in all 
instances the wide world over, just the moment it passed be- 
yond the lips of the individual prophet himself. 

Suppose again that God should decide to speak to the 
world out of a clear heaven over our heads, and declare to 
men his existence and reveal to them his characteristics : he 
must speak in some one human language. It would be a 
message only to those that heard. This message would have 
to be translated by fallible men into other languages. It 
would be only human testimony, human tradition to the next 
generation and all the future ages of the world, liable to ten 
thousand misconceptions, mistranslations, and misstatements 
of every kind. There is a report in the New Testament that 
is instructive in its suggestiveness in regard to this matter. 
It is said that on a certain occasion a great light shone upon 
a certain man, and that a voice spoke to him out of the light. 
And it is also said in this immediate connection that some 
of the people there saw the form of somebody, but did not 
hear anything; and some of the rest of them heard the 
voice, but saw nothing. On another occasion, when it is 
said that a voice out of the sky spoke to Jesus himself, there 



88 God. 

did not seem to be any agreement on the part of the listeners. 
Some of them said it thundered only ; some of them said it 
was the divine voice. It is absurd to suppose that in any 
such way as this there could be the possibility of an infallible 
revelation. What would it mean to us to-day if the report 
came to us from a hundred years ago that somebody in Eu- 
rope heard the voice of God out of heaven speaking to him? 
No sane man would believe it. It at any rate would be open 
to most serious question. We should have to rely upon his 
accuracy of hearing as to what the voice said, upon his wis- 
dom, upon his judgment. It would not be, in other words, 
the infallible voice of God, but only human testimony as to 
what a fallible man supposed he heard. 

Take again that other supposition, that God should write 
a book. Suppose God did write one with his own finger, — 
only he would have to assume a finger for the occasion ; that 
is, he would have to limit himself, bring himself down to the 
level of a man, in order to do it. But suppose he did it, — 
that he wrote an absolutely infallible book. He would have 
to write it in some one of the many languages of the world. 
It would have to be translated into the rest, and would be 
liable to misinterpretation and mistranslation in every form. 
Suppose he should write it at the same time in all the lan- 
guages of the world. Any one who is at all familiar with 
this subject knows that languages are perpetually being 
born and languages are dying, just like members of the 
human race. And, if he had written it in the English lan- 
guage of Chaucer's time, we could not read it to-day without 
translation. And, furthermore, human language itself is a 
fallible medium for the carrying of ideas. There is no 
possibility, I suppose, that any living man could put into 
language his ideas on any possible subject in such a way 
that that language should bear one meaning, and only one. 



Why Does He not Reveal Himself? 89 

Here are commentators by the thousand, to-day, fighting 
not only over the Bible, but over Shakespeare, — not only 
over what he wrote, but as to what he meant by what all 
admit that he wrote. There is no possible word that con- 
veys one shade of meaning, and only one. And, when you 
have a phrase that may mean any one of half a dozen dif- 
ferent things, let it be ever so infallible as it issues from 
God, how shall we know which one of the six possible 
meanings it shall bear? The giving to the world, then, an 
infallible revelation by a book, if you trace it through and 
see what it means, is an absurdity on the face of it. Look 
at the Bible itself. Suppose, for a moment, that it is in- 
fallible; and then look at the hundreds and thousands of 
different readings. Look at the sects arrayed in deadly 
battle against each other, — one of them fighting for what he 
believes to be God's truth, on the interpretation of a little 
text, and building a whole sect on it ; another believing 
that the first is an emissary of the devil because he gives 
it that interpretation, and he building another sect on the 
other side of the same text. It is simply impossible that 
there should be an infallible revelation given to men in 
any such way. 

Once more, suppose that God, by an interposition of mirac- 
ulous power, should write his name across the sky in letters 
of stars; should declare thus that God is; that he loves men; 
that he desires them to do so and so. This, again, would have 
to be in some one special language of the world. It would 
have to be translated and interpreted to all the rest of the 
nations. Or, if it were written in all the different languages 
of the world, the meaning of words changes from age to 
age, as I have already told you. People a few hundred 
years from now would not be able to read it. And then, 
again, it would be open to any man to question as to whether 



90 God. 

the supposed purposed arrangement of stars aid not take 
place under precisely the same law that arranges them in 
their present wonderful order. The formation of crystals of 
frost on your window-panes is just as wonderful as would 
be any other arrangement of those same crystals that should 
make them spell out letters and words. 

Again, suppose God should attempt to attract the devotion 
of the world by a series of stupendous miracles. Suppose 
these miracles occurred to-day. The next generation would 
have to take the fact of their occurrence on our testimony ; 
and the chances are that, if they were wise, they would not 
believe a word about it. Again, consider the thoughts that 
would spring up out of the occurrence of these stupendous 
miracles. The question would at once arise as to whether 
the same God, who is accustomed to work through the orderly 
arrangement of the world, was the one who was disturbing 
and upsetting this orderly arrangement, — the question whether 
there were not two gods, one of them wiser and better than 
the other, one of them trying to keep things in order and the 
other to disturb it. For, if God is doing right in the present 
arrangement of the world, if he is doing the best, any change 
in that right or best could only be a change of that right and 
best to the relatively wrong ; and this miraculous disturbance 
would upset the confidence and destroy the possibility of 
knowledge on the part of civilization. A revelation of this 
kind, then, is absurd. 

And now, having reviewed thus briefly all these different 
conceivable ways and found them wanting in some one essen- 
tial element of infallibility, where are we left ? Are we 
stranded on the shore of the impossibility of God's speaking 
to man at all ? No : I believe that God has spoken to man, 
and that he is speaking to-day ; and that, in the very nature 
of things, being a living and working God, he must speak to 



Why Does He not Reveal Himself f 91 

every intelligence that is competent to understand the sym- 
bols by which he utters his thoughts and his laws. God has 
given man a revelation, — a revelation in two volumes : vol- 
ume first, the physical laws and life of the universe ; and vol- 
ume second, the nature and history and aspiration and hopes 
and struggles of man. Physical nature and man are the per- 
petual, the living, the progressive, the ever-unfolding revela- 
tion of God. God has revealed himself as existing, as the 
one, as the infinite, as the eternal, as intelligent, as conscious, 
as personal, — in the sense I have given to that word, — as 
good, as the father and friend of man. Look over the leaves, 
for a moment, of this magnificent revelation, and see some of 
the things therein contained. The greatness of God : his 
grandeur is manifested in the stars, the depths, the infinite 
depths of the heavens over our heads ; and then, even in 
this world, the might and the majesty of mountains, the 
grandeur of oceans, the perilous magnificence of avalanches, 
the precipitous heights and mountainous valleys, like the 
Yosemite ; the thunderous grandeur of cataracts, like Niag- 
ara ; the overpowering greatness that thrusts itself upon us 
at every turn, and awes us with the fulness of the majesty of 
this being of which even these things are only whispers, 
while we are compelled to say, The greatness, "the thunders 
of his power, who can understand ? " In the placid bright- 
ness of the moon walking across the silvery night sky, the 
sheen of the waters under the glancing rays of the sun, the 
beautiful tinting of the unfolding rose, the more beautiful 
tinting of a maiden's cheek, the deep, unfathomable beauty 
of a little child's eye, the grace of the locks of hair that fall 
over their foreheads ; this instinct of beauty in man. that cre- 
ates wonderful statues out of stone, and covers canvas with 
the creations of his thought ; all this infinite beauty of the 
world, — the music of bird-songs, the beauty of the plumage 



92 God. 

of the bird of paradise, the wondrous and artistic finish of 
the humming-bird's wing, beauty in the heavens above and 
in the earth beneath, — only a little glinting and shadowing 
forth of the infinite beauty that is deep in the heart of the 
universe, and shines out as a flash of the glory of God. And 
then the love of God, manifested in the infinite bounty of the 
universe on every hand ; welling up in the feelings of friend- 
ship ; incarnate in the mother bending over the cradle of her 
child or watching through hours of silent agony day after 
day, night after night ; the love that binds husband and wife 
together, and creates all the beauty and happiness of the 
world ; the devotion witnessed to by martyr fires, by the 
heroic struggles and toils and travels and battles for human- 
ity and for the right ; the pity, the tenderness, and charity 
of men like Wilberforce, of men like Howard, of men like our 
own heroic Garrison, — men that cared and suffered and dared 
for men they had never seen and never would see ; for those 
that were criminal, shut up, by the hand of justice, in prison; 
for those that would never learn to lisp their name or pay 
them one iota of gratitude, — all these things, simply little 
glints and gleamings and outshinings of the infinite life of 
this universe, whispering what it can never utter, the unspeak- 
able, the unutterable reserve that is ever behind ! 

This universe then, — all its essential laws a revelation 
of God's truth, all its beauty a revelation of God's taste, all 
its heroism and devotion and kindness and charity a revela- 
tion of God's love, — this universe, then, — nature and man, 
these two volumes, — is the one book of God, and the only 
book that God has ever written. All truth is a part of this 
book, whether in Christianity or Buddhism, whether in 
America or the heart of Africa, whether in the stars or 
the earth, whether in science or religion, whether among the 
brutes or among men. Whatever is true is a letter, a sylla- 



Why Does He not Reveal Himself? 93 

ble, a phrase, a sentence, of the writing of this book of God. 
Whatever is untrue, — whether it fell from the lips of Jesus 
or Buddha, whether it be in Christian Bible or Hindoo Bible 
or African fetichism, — whatever is untrue is a misreading, 
a mistranslation, a misinterpretation of the one, magnificent, 
only book of God. All the Bibles that were ever written 
were only attempts, partial attempts, to transcribe the infi- 
nite and eternal truth. And it seems to me not only absurd, 
but impious, if men understood its implication, to claim 
that a book written centuries ago, when the world was bar- 
baric, when ninety-nine hundredths of the modern knowl- 
edge of civilization was unknown, — a book written nobody 
knows where, nobody knows when, nobody knows by whom, 
for the most part, — I say it seems to me not only absurd, 
but impious, for men to thrust this upon us, and say, Here is 
the book and the only book of God ; and you are impious 
and rebellious against God, when you prefer the w r hole to a 
feeble attempt to transcribe a part. For this infinite book of 
God does not exclude Christianity, does not exclude Jesus, 
does not exclude the Bible : it includes all that the experi- 
ence of the race has verified, or ever shall verify as true, 
and subsumes it as a part in its magnificent generalization. 
This, then, is the book of God, the only conceivable revela- 
tion that could be made to man, — a book written in letters, 
a part of which every intelligence can read. And that is the 
only possibility concerning any book that ever was written. 
It can be read just as fast and as far as human intelligence 
rises to the height of its magnificent meaning. 

Now, then, let us glance over for a moment, one after an- 
other, a few of the main characteristics of this revelation. 
This revelation of God in physical nature and in man is in 
itself an infallible revelation. But, as I said at the opening 
of my discourse, it, equally with any other book, must be 



94 God. 

liable to error and mistranslation and misinterpretation on 
our part. Infallible in itself, it must forever be fallible to us, 
because we can never be absolutely certain that, in this par 
ticular or that, we may not have made a more or less serious 
mistake. And yet it contains all truth ; and as fast as we 
are able to read it, as far as we are able to verify its state- 
ments, we shall have attained all the infallibility that is pos- 
sible, all the infallibility that is desirable. 

The next characteristic of this word of God is that it is 
an oracle never silent. In the words of the Psalm which I 
read as our lesson this morning, " Day uttereth speech unto 
day, and night showeth knowledge unto night. There is no 
speech nor language where their voice is not heard. Their 
line has gone out into all the earth, and their words to the 
end of the world." That is, God at the same moment speaks 
in every language, speaks to every race, speaks to every man, 
and speaks just as much of his truth as the man physically, 
intellectually, morally, and spiritually is capable of compre- 
hending. It is not a Bible that depends upon any one per- 
son's translation, or a translation made at any one time. It 
is not a Bible depending upon tradition, it is not a Bible 
depending upon human testimony. This word of God spoke 
a hundred thousand years ago, and with the same unerring 
voice it speaks to-day. To-day any man may listen, he may 
listen to-night, he may hear it to-morrow. It will speak 
through the next hundred thousand years, it will utter itself 
forever. A Bible then, is this, not depending upon the trans- 
lation of any one man, upon the testimony of any one man 
or group of men, upon the tradition of any one man or 
group of men, — a Bible whose language never becomes obso- 
lete, never is outworn, never is capable of being misrepre- 
sented by one man to another in such a way that he can- 
not correct the error. 



Why Does He not Reveal Himself? 95 

Another characteristic of this Bible is that it is progres- 
sive in its revelations. All of God's truth, all of God's life, 
is here ; but it unfolds itself like a scroll of parchment, such 
as men used to read, to keep step, age after age, with the 
progress of human intelligence and human need. We can 
read to-day all we need to know to-day for the practical car- 
rying on of our life. To-morrow, we can read all that we 
shall need to know for to-morrow. And here is one thing, 
if you will allow me by way of parenthesis to stop and im- 
press it upon you, that I would like to say. One great 
source of all the miseries of the world is just here : instead 
of men busily engaging themselves in doing those things 
that are practical and necessary for to-day, to make the world 
what it ought to be to-day, they neglect these present duties, 
scattered loosely all about their feet, while they muse and 
speculate over things that as yet it is not possible for them 
to know, and that would be of no practical value, if it were. 
We know enough to-day to lay the foundations here in 
Boston of the veritable kingdom of God. We know enough 
to-day here in Boston to sweep out of existence literally nine- 
tenths of the evils under which humanity suffers. But these 
things, for the most part, we are neglecting, while we dream 
and speculate and quarrel as to whether we are to know our 
friends in the future life, or whether we are to be encased in 
bodies or to flit about as intangible ghosts, — matters impos- 
sible for us to settle, and of no practical use to us, if we 
could settle them. 

Another characteristic of this revelation is what I have 
already more than once hinted at in the course of my discus- 
sion. It is a revelation adequate to all our needs. It gives 
us information, and all the information that is necessary, con- 
cerning all the great practical questions of life. There is no 
one single thing that you need to know in order to live the 



g6 God. 

noblest manly and womanly life about which there is any 
serious practical discussion. They are speculative matters 
that you are doubting about and troubling yourself over. 

The last characteristic that I shall ask you to notice is 
that this revelation not only is not finished, but in the nature 
of things never will be, and never can be finished. It is a 
revelation unfolding age after age, keeping step with the 
progress of human intelligence, and determined by that 
intelligence. And, if you will think of it for a moment, you 
will be put at rest concerning many of the problems that 
have perplexed and troubled you. Why does not God reveal 
to me the things that are beyond the present experience of . 
the world ? Perhaps you assume that he might, if he chose ; 
that it is a mere arbitrary drawing of the veil on the part of 
our Father in heaven. And perhaps, moreover, you wonder 
why it is, whether he really is willing to tell us. Do you 
know you are asking an absurdity ? You are asking an im- 
possibility. What does knowledge mean ? It has no mean- 
ing whatever, except as it generalizes the results of human 
experience. We know, and can know, only what the world 
has found out by experience ; for that is what knowledge 
means. There is no possibility of knowing anything beyond 
that experience. Let me refer to the old and often used 
illustration of our relation to a child, that I may make this 
perfectly clear ; for I believe it to be very important. I take 
my child, seven years of age, and I try with all the power of 
language that I possess to make clear to her what some- 
thing means that is years ahead of her experience. I am en- 
gaged in something that is absurd, useless, a waste of time. 
I may put it into ever so clear words : she cannot possibly 
comprehend what they mean. Suppose we are sailing out 
in a ship over an unknown and heretofore untraversed sea. 
Why, of course the only way that I can know what there is 



Why Does He not Reveal Himself f 97 

a hundred miles ahead of me is by sailing over that hundred 
miles and finding out. There is no other possible way. 
Suppose God should attempt to put it into human language, 
into the English language, into the ordinary speech of Bos- 
ton, what the future life, what heaven means. He might 
give a perfectly adequate expression to it, but it would be 
utter jargon to us; for there is no possible way by which we 
can apprehend an idea that transcends the bounds and lim- 
its of human experience. Suppose a man should come back 
from travelling in a foreign land, and try to explain to you 
something the like of which you never heard of or saw. 
Do you not see the absurdity of the undertaking? You ask 
him what shape it had, and he would tell you it was not in 
the shape of anything that you ever saw. What color was 
it ? Why, it was an absolutely new color, not at all like any 
color you ever saw in your life. And so on concerning one 
after another of its characteristics. If he should tell you 
that it was not at all like anything you have ever seen, why, 
when he got through, no matter how long he talked, he would 
have simply told you nothing. And so if the future, the 
higher life, — granting its existence, — be utterly and entirely 
unlike anything that our experience has made us acquainted 
with up to this hour, then it is not an arbitrary drawing of 
the veil for God to hide the future. It is an impossibility 
that the veil should be drawn by any other than our own 
human hands. This revelation, then, will never be finished. 
It will keep step with our own experience and progress. 
And it will have that pleasing, luring mystery about it that 
makes us ever desire to walk on and on, and to see what of 
glory and greatness is in store for us in the future. And 
this is not a calamity : it is a marvellous blessing. When I 
know how a story is coming out, I do not want to read it 
any more. If I knew eternity already, it would be a weary, 



98 God. 

tedious task to walk through the ages. I should want to lie 
down and sink into an endless sleep. This revelation, then, 
will never be finished ; and, thank God, it never can be. 
We will read a new leaf every day, a new book every cen- 
tury ; and it will still have wonder-tales and glorious truths 
for us forever and forever. 



SHALL WE WORSHIP GOD? 



It is a fact so notorious as to need on my part not argu- 
ment nor proof, but only mention, that the popular feeling 
concerning the subject of worship is such that many men 
and women, the truest and best of the time, shrink from it 
as something not quite worthy of the noblest and most dig- 
nified manhood and womanhood. The very word calls up 
the thought of a cringing, half-whining, unmanly attitude 
toward God. It is associated in the thought of many with 
rituals and ceremonies that seem to them to have no vitality, 
no real meaning ; and so they come to feel that they cannot 
heartily enter into that which is accustomed to go by the 
name of worship. And, mark you, as I have already inti- 
mated, this is not because these men are not true, because 
they are not honest, because they are not earnest, not de- 
voted to all those things that make up in the popular esti- 
mate a noble, sweet, true, faithful life. A part of this feeling, 
I think, springs by way of reaction out of the very intensity 
of these noble and manly qualities. There is a feeling that 
when they are called to go to church and engage in worship 
they are somehow surrendering something of that which they 
have come to regard as noblest and best in their nature ; 
they are asked to do something that they feel their very man- 
liness forbids. 



ioo God. 

And then, on the other hand, these same people have a 
very serious question deep down in their hearts as to whether 
there is any being in the universe that wants them to do any- 
thing of the sort ; a question as to whether, if God exists, he 
is a being who cares whether they get down on their knees or 
not, whether they bow their head in the attitude of prayer, 
whether they read the prescribed ritual and scripture of the 
day from the prayer-book, whether they engage in those 
things that are customarily called worship ; and then a feel- 
ing stronger than this, — and which I must confess to you I 
heartily share, — as to whether, if God really wants them 
to flatter in the common terms of adulation, they can have 
any true, deep, hearty respect for him. We are accustomed 
to feel that those are not the noblest types of men who are 
pleased with fulsome flattery. They are not the noblest 
types of men who care the most for the shouts and the hat- 
waving of the crowd ; who are pleased to stand up and have 
an oration delivered to them, telling them how great and 
how noble and how fine they are. He who really deserves 
these things, we rather feel, shrinks from this public expres- 
sion of them. A gentleman, not long since, talking with a 
friend of mine, gave outright and common expression to 
this feeling, — one that I doubt not large numbers of you 
will sympathize with, — when he said in his plain, familiar 
fashion, " If there is any God in heaven, he must have a 
queer idea of the people who think they can please him by 
continually telling him how big he is." He can have no 
very great respect for men who think that it is real wor- 
ship, something that he desires, for them to be engaged in 
this fulsome adulation. 

I say this, in some rough sort of fashion, sets forth a very 
common, wide-spread feeling in the community. In order 
that we may understand the subject and see what relation 



Shall We Worship him ? IOI 

this sort of thing called worship bears to that which is gen- 
uine, we need at the very outset to start with a definition. 
What is worship ? What is it to worship anything ? Above 
all things, What is it to worship God 1 If we take the senti- 
ment that goes by this name and analyze it carefully until we 
come to the feeling that lies at its heart, that gives it color 
and power and meaning, we shall, I think, discover that the 
one element that all genuine worship has in common is the 
feeling that we call admiration. A man worships that which 
he admires, whether it be below him or above him, what- 
ever name he call it by, or whether he give it any verbal or 
formal expression or not. And in however many creeds he 
may write it down, through how many formalities soever he 
may pass, whatever he may say or do, a man does not wor- 
ship that which he does not heartily and earnestly admire. 
Worship, then, is admiration. Let us keep that one defini- 
tion in mind, and let it run all through our discussion, link- 
ing the different parts of it together, and, like a line of light, 
illuminating it all. 

And what is the tendency of this feeling of worship? 
What is its power over the heart and life of the worshipper ? 
The very definition that I have given you carries in its heart 
the answer to this question. A man instinctively and inev- 
itably tends to become like, to become assimilated to, that 
which he really admires. To use a Biblical expression, 
" Beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, w r e are 
changed into the same image." If a man really admires and 
worships that glory, he is transformed into its likeness, 
changed from glory to glory, day by day assimilating himself 
to it more and more. As an illustration of what I mean in 
its practical bearing on life and conduct, take the case of 
Alexander the Great. It is said that the one book that he 
cared for above all others in the world was Homer's Iliad ; 



102 God. 

and that the one character in all that book that impressed 
him, that became his ideal, was the character of Achilles. 
He slept with this poem under his pillow, and dreamed 
about it by day. It was the star that led him through his 
long campaigns from Greece to the depths of Asia. And 
the natural result followed. Worshipping this ideal warrior, 
he, day by day, consciously or unconsciously, modelled and 
moulded his life after the pattern of the Grecian hero. On 
the other hand, let a man take the ideal saint of the Cath- 
olic Church as his model ; let the one book that he shall 
read be The Imitation of Christ, by a Kempis ; let him 
sleep with that under his pillow ; let him carry it about his 
person, read snatches of it day by day, see in that one ideal 
wrapped up all the glory, the beauty, the greatness, the 
grandeur of human life, — and it needs no prophecy to tell 
what course of action he will pursue ; it needs no wise fore- 
sight to indicate the position he will occupy next year or in 
ten years. He becomes inevitably transformed into the like- 
ness of that which he worships. Precisely the same is true 
if it be some thoroughly ignoble thing. Let a woman care 
more than for anything else for the position that she occupies 
in fashionable society. It may not be anything evil in itself ; 
but let this be the supreme object of her worship, the one 
thing that she admires more than everything else. She may 
go to church every Sunday in the year ; she may read her 
prayer-book every day ; she may attend all the festivals and 
feasts and days of Lent and the Easter and the Christmas 
services ; she may devote herself to all this external cere- 
monial, and may think that she is worshipping God. But so 
long as this is the one thing that she really, deep down in 
her heart, cares for more than for anything else, she inevita- 
bly becomes transformed into this likeness ; and, whether 
she recognizes it or not, those that know her will recognize 



Shall We Worship Him ? 103 

that she is becoming no larger, no grander, no tenderer, no 
deeper, no truer than the ideal which is really her God. 

Precisely the same thing holds true in every direction. I 
need not enlarge upon it. If I could become intimately 
acquainted with the character of any one of you here this 
morning, I need not ask you what you worship. I need not 
ask you whether you worship God or not, or whether your 
worship be in the other direction. I should know from 
what you are what that one ideal is which you have learned 
most of all to admire. And if I can see on the part of any 
one of you a beginning to think and to study, to reach out 
toward, care for, aspire after something higher and better 
than you are to-day, if I can see what that thing is, and 
know that there clings about it something of the beauty, 
something of the truth, something of the goodness of God, 
that it is an ideal above you, and that you are really reaching 
out after it earnestly, I need no prophet to tell me what you 
will become in the years that are before you. I know by a 
law as inevitable as that of gravitation that you will become 
gradually transformed into the image of that which is the 
object of your worship. 

Now, then, for a little more clearness in regard to this 
religious worship and its nature, let us look at two or three 
of the common things that are supposed pre-eminently to 
constitute the worship of God, and see whether they do or 
not. It is very common for ministers in the pulpit, as they 
are beginning the office of public prayer, to ask the people 
to join with them in worship. A man who engages in private 
prayer in his own closet thinks of himself as worshipping 
God. If a family group in the morning or the evening 
gather together to read over some sacred words from one or 
another scripture, and then kneel down together and unite 
in their supplications, as they have been trained and habitu- 



104 God. 

ated to do from the years of their childhood up, they sup- 
pose themselves engaged in worshipping God. But, in the 
light of the definition that we have already given, it is perti- 
nent and important for us to raise the question as to whether 
they are worshipping God. Persons pray under the impulse 
of fear ; they pray because of habit ; they pray from a 
sense of duty ; they pray that they may ward off some sup- 
posed possible evil that is likely to come to them in the 
future ; they pray from very selfishness, that they may gain 
something at the hand of God that they think will not be 
given to them on any other conditions. Now, in any of these 
cases, if this be all, or if any one of these principles be pre- 
eminent, then there will not be connected with this act of 
prayer the slightest shadow of a shade of worship. It may 
not be worship at all : it may be even an offence and an 
abomination in the sight of Him who cares not for the out- 
ward expression, but for the reality at the heart. 

Or take the public church and temple services of the 
world in their totality. Churches, in popular language, are 
called houses of worship. Temples are houses of worship. 
People gather together on their feast days, their fast days, 
their new moons, their sabbaths, their holy days of any kind, 
and unite, as they say, in public worship. But are they wor- 
shipping God in any of these ceremonials through which they 
are passing? The answer depends. It depends entirely 
upon this very question as to whether this outward ceremo- 
nial is the outward expression on their part of a real admira- 
tion for that which is divine ; or whether, as in the case of 
the prayer, it be a habit, it be for the sake of gaining some- 
thing at the hand of God, it be not the impulse of fear or the 
mere expression of selfishness. 

And so in regard to the public processions of religion. 
Suppose you go to Rome on one of the most important feast 



Shall We Worship Him ? 105 

days of their year \ and the streets are all alive, for to-day 
the Pope himself appears in procession, accompanied by hun- 
dreds of the priesthood and cardinals and dignitaries of the 
Church; and the people, while the figure, the image of 
Christ, the bambino, passes by, fall down on their faces 
in the dust. Is this worship ? It may be, and it may not. 
And so when the Jews came from all over Palestine to Jeru- 
salem to engage in what they called their temple-worship, — 
let it be the feast of tabernacles or of harvest, — gathering 
there by thousands, meeting early in the morning at the 
time of the sunrise to chant their songs of praise, meeting 
again for their elaborate ceremonials and rituals, — the whole 
city alive with this great jubilee, — on these feast days of re- 
ligion are the people engaged in worship ? Perhaps they 
are, perhaps not. The whole question here depends upon 
whether they really worship God in their hearts, whether 
they really admire him, or are only engaged in external 
diplomacy, carrying out habits of action, endeavoring to 
appease his wrath or act upon his inclinations toward them 
to induce him to grant them some great national favor. It 
may be no more worship than is that of the man who goes 
to Washington, and fawns and plans and plots through days 
and weeks and months to gain the ear of some favorite of 
him who is highest in power, that he may bring to pass some- 
thing of benefit to himself or a friend, or the town of which 
he is a citizen. He may in his heart even despise the very 
man on whom he fawns, and before whom he gets down in 
humiliation that he may win his favor. 

And so in regard to the great acts and lives of ascetics in 
the past. Simeon Stylites, standing by the year upon his 
pillar, — was he worshipping God, or was he winning the 
plaudits of the multitude, hoping some day to be called a 
saint, to be looked up to himself, and to be worshipped 



106 God. 

rather than to worship God ? It is the answer to this ques- 
tion that decides whether this form of asceticism or another 
is real worship or whether it is not. And so in regard to 
the great public sacrifices of religion, — the holocausts, the 
burnt offerings, the giving of flowers or fruits or animals, — 
the offering them up with incense to the God of heaven; 
or those other sacrifices in our own human lives, when we 
fast during Lent, when we give up that which we desire, be- 
cause religion or a priest or public opinion or society bids us 
do so, — are these things worship of God, again ? Hold them 
up in the clear flame of our definition of worship, as I have 
given it to you, and see what the color of the deed may be. 
There is no worship, except that which is a feeling or an 
expression of sincere admiration for that which is the object 
of worship. 

Worship may or may not be expressed. There may be 
simply this transient feeling in the heart, which passes away 
as feeling or which silently thrills and lifts the life, making 
the man himself feel stronger, purer, nobler, better. Though 
his lip may not have moved, though this feeling may not 
have uttered itself in one single bodily movement or habit 
of any kind, yet, if there be this simple, genuine feeling of 
admiration for that which is above us, then there is in the 
heart, so far as it goes, true, sincere worship of God. And 
yet, if there be this genuine sentiment of admiration, if it be 
strong within us, if it abide with us day by day and be not 
simply a flitting, transient feeling that comes and goes, then 
it will of necessity find for itself external utterance. A man 
will speak, and he cannot help speaking his worship. A 
man will live, and he cannot help living out his worship. It 
may not utter itself in rituals, it may not utter itself through 
the prescribed channels that are popular at the time ; but, if 
the man be a genuine, day-by-day worshipper of that which 



Shall We Worship Him ? 107 

is true and noble, it must shape his character, shape his 
deeds, shape his utterances, and so become visible in some 
external forms, whether those forms be the same ones week 
by week or whether they vary infinitely, according to the 
changing circumstances of life. 

It follows then — and here is the important point for us to 
notice — ■ that if worship be the genuine admiration of the 
heart and not any external form or uttered word, — it follows, 
I say, that many persons may really be worshippers of God 
who think they are not. I meet a great many men, first and 
last, who would make no sort of claim to being religious. 
They are dominated by some traditional definition of religion. 
They think it means going to church, or going to church 
regularly, or going in some prescribed way ; that it means 
caring about certain sacred days, about certain sacred 
books ; that it means the ability to talk in the prescribed 
religious or sacred speech of the time ; that it means some- 
thing formal, something that to them has become only an 
externality with the life all gone out. They reject these 
things. They are not accustomed to engage in public, per- 
haps not by outward utterance of word in even private, 
prayer. They are not accustomed to do anything that goes 
in the churches by the name of worship, and so they fancy 
that they are not worshippers ; that here is a whole depart- 
ment of human life from which they, by some peculiarity of 
their nature, are excluded. Now, it may be that a person 
like this has estimated himself correctly, — that he is not a 
worshipper. It may be that he does not admire those 
things that are divine, those things that are godlike, that 
are above him, that lift and inspire the noblest thoughts 
of the world. But it does not at all follow that he is not 
religious, that he is not a sincere worshipper, because he, in 
the light of the popular definition of the time, fancies that he 



108 God. 

is not. He may be a man who genuinely loves his home ; a 
man who worships the ideal of womanhood in the wife that 
he has learned to love ; a man whose heart is thrilled and 
touched by all the beautiful ways of the children about his 
feet ; who sees in them the mystery of this strange and un- 
known thing, so familiar, so infinite, so unfathomable, that 
we call life ; he may be touched by the beautiful things of 
the world about him, may pause and gather even a small 
grass-blade by the roadside, in a walk, and think, until this 
frail, tiny thing takes him out on an excursion into the 
infinite, and he stands awestruck and wondering before this 
mystery of the world ; the sight of a wee flower may, as it 
used to in the case of Wordsworth, touch him even to tears ; 
he may find his soul thrilled and swelling at the tones of the 
waves on the seashore, like a musician's thrilled and lifted 
up by the grand notes of an organ ; he may stand wrapt 
under the mystery of the night sky ; find himself touched 
and moved by whatever is noble, whatever is beautiful, what- 
ever is true, whatever is great in all the world. Such a man 
as that is a worshipper, and a worshipper of God, if he never 
saw a church or never read a line of a so-called Sacred 
Book in his whole life. A man who is thrilled, who is 
touched by beauty, by truth, by goodness, who is lifted up by 
the grandeur of the world, — that man, however feebly, falter- 
ingly, unconsciously to himself it may be, that man has 
climbed step by step up the golden, marble stairways of wor- 
ship that " slope through darkness up to God." 

It follows, on the other hand, that there may be very 
many men scrupulous and particular, who care very much 
for the mint, the anise, and the cumin, who are very par- 
ticular about the regularity of prayers, about church attend- 
ance, of festivals and of feast days, — who are very scru- 
pulous, I say, in regard to all these things, and who pull 



Shall We Worship Him ? 109 

their skirts a little closer about them as they pass this other 
type of man upon the street, lest the infection of his irre- 
ligion or infidelity might touch them, — it may, I say, be very 
well true that this other type of man, called pre-eminently 
religious, may not have about him one whit of that which is 
genuine, true religiousness, or worship of the living God. He 
may care only for these things, while his heart is narrow, 
while he lives simply for himself, thinks only of his family, the 
little circle of those whose reflected glory will cast some glory 
upon him, who only seeks personal advantage, place polit- 
ical or social for himself, who loves to hear men call him 
Rabbi, who sits in the chief seats in the synagogues, — in 
the highest places of worship, — and who has not in his soul 
the capacity to be thrilled with a generous emotion, to be 
stirred, to be lifted up by anything that is grand and noble. 
Such a man as this, though he attend church every day in 
the week, and read the Bible and go through the form of 
prayer morning and night his whole life through, is irrelig- 
ious, and is no worshipper of God. 

That we then may conceive and understand somewhat the 
breadth and comprehensiveness of this act of worship, let us 
look at it for a moment in its threefold character. A large 
number of the grandest activities of the world have hith- 
erto, on account of the narrowness of our religious defini- 
tions, been excluded from any part in the grand chorus of 
those that have in all ages chanted, " Glory to God in the 
highest ! " 

And, in the first place, let us regard the claims of that 
class of worshippers who almost exclusively, or at any rate 
pre-eminently, care for the beauty of the world. You will 
readily see that those I refer to are the ones that we 
speak of as artists. Are these worshippers of God ? and is 
art a department of divine worship ? It has not been so con- 



fio God. 

ceived generally. The Puritans in England considered that 
they were doing God service when they entered the churches 
and broke down and battered with their sword or their spear 
everything that appealed to the aesthetic sense, whatever was 
beautiful. And there are churches still in the world who 
think that an organ is the invention of the evil one, who 
have no place for the highest manifestation of music in the 
service of God. And yet, in the light of the definition of 
God that we have discovered in this series of sermons, God 
is the source of the three great divisions of human life. He 
is the source of beauty, the source of truth, the source of 
goodness. And these three great departments of human 
life will, when the world comprehends the breadth and scope 
of the divine, be included in the one comprehensive act of 
worship. It is only in modern times that the world has 
learned to care for the beauty of nature. To be sure, 
among the old Hebrews and Greeks, and in many ancient 
nations, that which ever pressed upon them in the grandeur 
of the sky could not escape their attention. But it is only 
in the modern world that poets have sung the beauty of 
nature, that landscape has crept into words and been trans- 
ferred to canvas, — only in the modern world that this wide 
realm of the earth beneath our feet and all around us has 
been thought of as manifesting a spirit of beauty and of life 
worthy the attention of the greatest minds. The man, then, 
who, looking out over the world, is stirred by the beauty of 
nature : the man whose soul is thrilled by the loveliness of 
the sunrise or the sunset ; the man who is touched by the 
infinity over his head ; the man whose soul is lifted up by 
the magnificence of the mountains; the man who simply 
responds to the appeals of the world's beauty, — ■ that man is, 
so far as he goes, a worshipper, and a worshipper not simply 
of nature : he is a worshipper of God, who has expressed 



Shall We Worship Him ? Ill 

himself and spoken through the beauty of that world. And 
he may be religious and a worshipper, so far as this extends, 
even though he care not one jot or tittle for that which is 
ordinarily called truth, even though he be unmoral, or even 
immoral. Take, for example, such a man as Byron as an 
extreme illustration of what I mean. When Byron describes 
that magnificent thunder-storm in the Alps, — the finest of 
its kind that I know of in our literature, — and then goes on 
and says : — 

" And this is in the night. Most glorious night I 
Thou wert not sent for slumber ! let me be 
A sharer in thy fierce and far delight, 
A portion of the tempest and of thee ! " — 

And when, in contrast to that, dipping his oar at twilight, 
he sings : — 

" Clear, placid Leman ! thy contrasted lake 
With the wild world I dwelt in is a thing 
Which warns me, with its stillness, to forsake 
Earth's troubled waters for a purer spring." — 

Or when, looking at the stars that men have aspired toward 
in all ages, he says : — 

" Whoever looked upon them shining, 
And turned to earth without repining, 
Nor wished for wings to flee away, 
And mix with their eternal ray ? " — 

Tell me, if you will, that Byron cared nothing for truth, 
that he cared nothing for the ordinary moralities of life ; 
yet, so far as this magnificent manifestation of God is con- 
cerned, that we call beauty, he was a worshipper, and a 
worshipper of God. So far as it reaches, this is the gen- 
uine note of religiousness in the soul of man. And so 
of the artist who paints pictures, who carves statues, who 



112 God. 

sings in verse, who pours out his soul in music, who has 
an ear that, listening, can catch those strange, weird, and 
mysterious harmonies that sing to his soul while all is 
silence only to those of duller comprehension. These artists 
are worshippers ; and this is a part, and a very important 
part, of religion. 

And then in regard to that other element, the element of 
truth, that which is covered by the word " science. " Take 
those men that through their whole lives long, at the cost of 
self-sacrifice and devotion of the noblest kind, give them- 
selves up to the simple pursuit of truth; who put flattery 
and honors one side that they may pursue the shadow of 
truth ; who put money one side, as did Agassiz, saying, in 
some of the grandest words that were ever uttered, that he 
had "no time to stop to make money," for he had caught a 
vision of this ideal of truth that flitted before him, and he 
must follow that. Take the chemist who pursues the mech- 
anism of those marvellous things that we call atoms, divid- 
ing them, part from part, until he gets down beyond that 
which is visible, and then invents all sorts of marvel- 
lous instruments that he may take and hold that which the 
eye cannot see or the hand handle or the ear hear; who pur- 
sues it down and down, until he opens at last a little case- 
ment that only the imagination can conceive, and through 
that looks out upon the infinitesimal, the infinitely little, and 
stands face to face there with God the inconceivable. On 
the other hand, a man like Newton, who spends his life 
among the stars, surrounded by the infinitely great ; who 
pursues this search until, in the rapture of his soul, as did old 
Kepler, he breaks out at last, " O God ! I think over again 
thy thoughts after thee." Or take the geologist, who turns 
painfully and laboriously, year after year, the leaves of strata 
that the ages have laid down under our feet ; who reads the 



Shall We Worship Him? 113 

meaning of the impact and rebound of the little rain-drop 
that fell upon what was soft sand a hundred thousand years 
ago ; who studies the meaning of the impression of a leaf 
that belonged to some part of the world's flora long since 
extinct ; who sees and unfolds the significance of a bird- 
track that belonged to a race that the world has not seen 
now for many and many a millennium of time. These men 
that, in any department, at the cost of sacrifice and toil and 
trouble, devote themselves to unfolding the truth of God, 
are they not worshippers at the shrine of him who is the God 
of truth ? They may care little for art, for poetry, for music; 
they may care little for that which technically goes by the 
name of religion ; they may live, like Audubon, for years and 
years in the woods, never seeing a church or a priest : but 
they dwell in the very presence and under the shadow of the 
Almighty. 

And, then, that other department, in which alone the world 
has been accustomed to find true worship, — the worship of 
goodness, the worship of those men whose sunshiny deeds 
and words have flashed a rainbow across the age-long shower 
of falling human tears, — the men who have devoted them- 
selves to helping those who are needy, to alleviating the lot 
of the prisoner, to struggling for the triumph of the civiliza- 
tion of mankind, those that have been the world's martyrs 
and heroes, those that have stood forth as the prophets in 
the dispensation of the highest eras of thought and life, those 
who have been the great religious leaders of men, whose 
names have stood even for the one unutterable name of God, 
— here undoubtedly is that department of human worship 
which is highest of all. And we are accustomed to lay upon 
this the grandest, the most significant emphasis, for the 
reason that here is found the secret of human happiness and 
human welfare. We can dispense with much that is called 



H4 God. 

science, we can dispense with a great deal more which is 
called art ; but human society cannot exist and human prog- 
ress is not possible, unless men are true to that which we 
regard as good, unless they devote themselves to these noble 
ideals of the moral life of man. 

Either one of these three kinds of worship may be fol- 
lowed to the practical exclusion of the rest. Such worship, 
while true so far as it gees, will thus be distorted and incom- 
plete. Complete worship is the right combination of all. 

I want now to raise the question, and answer it briefly as I 
can, as to whether we are to suppose that God cares anything 
about our worshipping him. We have seen that God is to 
be thought of, in our human similitudes and symbols, as con- 
scious, as intelligent, as good. God is our father • and that 
very word answers it. I believe God does care, that there is 
a thrill in the infinite heart in answer to this thrill of inspira- 
tion and love in our own. Just as every stamp of my foot 
here on this platform to-day is felt in the sun, however feebly 
it may be, so the feeblest upspringing of love and adoration 
in my heart sends out its tiny wavelets clear to the throne 
of Infinity itself. Here, among men, we do not regard it 
- as an evidence that a man is great and noble, if it be pos- 
sible for him to outgrow any care for his children or what 
they may think about him. When a man of towering intel- 
lect and genius can stoop to play with the prattling little 
ones at his feet, to lift them and hold them in his arms, 
we say that thus he only intensifies and ennobles our concep- 
tion of. that which is greatest in him. Is there any reason 
why we should think that ignoble up there which we call 
noblest here below? 

Now, then, one practical question : Is it worth while for us 
to have a day and a place and a ceremonial of worship ? I 
have observed, in regard to all the ten thousand activities of 



Shall We Worship Him ? 115 

the world, that they are neglected, that they are never done, 
if they are left at hap-hazard. Men have a time for studying 
science, if they are interested in it. They have a time to 
devote themselves to beauty, if they care for it. They have 
a time to spend with their families, if they love their homes. 
They have a time to attend to their business. And nothing 
is attended to in this world, in the long run, that does not 
have its time. We have inherited this day on which now we 
are gathered together, — a grand, magnificent opportunity, — 
and I would devote it to that which represents the largest, 
deepest, highest interests of man; and I would not allow 
anything to take away from me the privilege and opportunity 
of giving at least some part of the day to those things which 
are highest of all, and which concern the most important 
part of my being. At the same time, you will readily see 
how, in accordance with the definition of the meaning of 
worship that I have given you, it must be proper for us to 
open public libraries and picture galleries, and make it as 
easy as possible to empty the weary, worn city into the lap of 
mother earth, in summertime. I would have this worshipping 
hour, in which to devote ourselves to that development of 
life which is called goodness, character, conduct ; I would 
gain from it all the inspiration possible ; and then I would 
make it as easy as possible for men to devote themselves to 
the other sides of worship that I have spoken of; to look 
upon images of beauty in picture galleries, to study the 
truths and the laws of God in public libraries, and to see 
and smell and hear all that is fair and sweet and restful in 
the country for those that the town shuts in. And thus this 
threefold worship of God may find natural and ample room 
on this one free day. 

Now, I want to just give you, in as brief a view as is possible, 
an outline of my ideal of a place of worship. If we had no 



n6 God. 

house in which we could meet, and it were left to me to 
dictate as to what it should be, I would have something 
after the fashion which I will now suggest. I would have 
a church beautiful in its architecture. I would have one 
as fine as we could easily and honestly afford. It should 
stand as the ideal of beauty and of truth. It should suggest 
aspiration. Its very outline should lead forward and lure 
upward the thoughts and the emotions. And, then, fine 
music, as fine as organ tone and human voice could pro- 
duce. But, the main thing, I would have it fuller of sugges- 
tions of the history of the heroism and the glory of man than 
is Westminster Abbey. I would have it fuller of relic and 
of picture and of beautiful, suggestive things than any 
Catholic cathedral of the world. Busts, statues, pictures, 
relics, and reminiscences of all the grand souls of the world 
should be in it, so that the eye should light, whichever way 
it turned, upon some suggestion of human nobility ; should 
see the figure or something to call up the idea of the man 
who has served his kind in the realm of art, in the realm of 
science, in the realm of philanthropy, in all departments of 
life. The great men of our history should be there. The 
air should be redolent with the perfume of their remembered 
deeds. The air should be alive and quivering with the whis- 
per of these spiritual presences, and of what they have done 
for men. And everywhere the soul should see something 
to suggest the highest possibility of life, something to stim- 
ulate and lift up and ennoble man. 

And then the internal activities of the church should cor- 
respond to all these three departments of worship. It should 
be a part of our work to cultivate eyes to see and hearts to 
feel all the infinite forms of the world's beauty. It should 
not be considered an irreligious thing for us in Sunday- 
school or on pulpit platform to study and develop scientific 



Shall We Worship Him? 117 

truth, to follow and trace the footsteps of God in nature. It 
should above all be our purpose to make men and women 
tender and pure, and noble and true. And thus, through 
this day-by-day and Sunday-by-Sunday worship, we would 
help lead on the world to the time when, in the words of the 
grand old Te Deum, we should be able to sing, "All the 
world doth worship thee, the Father everlasting." 



SHALL WE PRAY TO GOD? 



Perhaps no subject is more in doubt in the modern mind 
than this of prayer. On the one hand, there are many who 
have settled it with themselves that there is no place for 
prayer in the scientific conception of the universe. If they 
are in the pulpit, they have dropped this from their public 
service. Or, in place of it, they have substituted a sort of 
monologue addressed to nobody, — unless to the audience, — 
or an apostrophe to the universe in general, with no idea that 
anybody hears, or that anything is to come of it. If they are 
in the audience, they wonder why the minister keeps up what, 
to them, is an unmeaning form, or only a survival of super- 
stition. On the other hand, there are many tender souls who 
say : " We want to be rational : we admit the leadership of the 
head ; and yet our hearts cry out within us for sympathy and 
help. We want to pray, and we can hardly help praying." 
And so, between reason and feeling, they are buffeted this 
way and that, like a ship in contrary seas, finding no rest. 
Still a third class is simply bewildered. Not accepting the 
old ideas of prayer, and not clear in their minds as to whether 
anything is left, they wait until some deeper thought shall 
solve for them the problem. 

Putting aside all other purposes, then, I wish, in as plain 
and straightforward a way as possible, to offer what contri- 



Shall We Pray to Him ? 119 

bution I can toward the settlement of the perplexing ques- 
tions that involve this theme. 

Shall we pray or shall we not pray ? This is not, it seems 
to me, one of the indifferent things that may be done or let 
alone, and no one be either the better or the worse in either 
case. If prayer is a means of good to ourselves or others, 
then we ought to pray. If it is useless, then it is worse than 
that \ for it raises false expectations, leads thought and effort 
into paths that end nowhere, and is thus a waste of energy 
that might, in some other direction, be useful. Shall we 
pray then, or shall we not ? 

Let us go as near to the root of the matter as we can. 
When the primitive man first began to pray, what did he 
suppose himself to be doing ? Though bowed before a 
rough-hewn idol or even a fetich, — stick or stone, — we are 
not to commit the absurdity of supposing that he was praying 
to anything that he regarded as unconscious. Our barbaric 
ancestors had their philosophy or science of things as well as 
we. It goes without saying, that it was crude and ignorant. 
But to them, as far as their knowledge reached, it was ra- 
tional. As their first worship was ancestral, it was to the 
spirits of these dead ancestors that they offered their first 
prayers. The dead father or chief of the tribe was supposed 
to be still alive. He was like them ; knew their wants ; could 
sympathize with them ; was near, and could hear them. At 
the same time, as a spirit, he was possessed of supernatural 
and unlimited resources, and in sky or earth or air, at their 
request, could produce marvellous and magical results. 

But even their crude prayer contained other elements than 
mere begging. The germ is here of even the highest and 
noblest blossoms and fragrance that the devotion of the 
finest souls has produced. They not only asked, but they 
offered. Not only did they beg for children, for cattle, for 



120 God. 

success in hunting and fighting, but they also felt awe and 
adoration and a sense of communion with souls nobler but 
still like their own. . 

Which of all these elements that go to make up prayer 
would be the predominant one would depend on the charac- 
teristics of the devotee and on the conception he had formed 
of his God. I wish you to note this point with special 
care ; for it was not only true of barbaric prayer : it has been 
true in all ages, and it is just as true to-day. It is said 
that there is a small tribe in South America whose gods 
are thought to be so kindly and beneficent that they rarely 
ask them for anything : they only bring offerings and give 
thanks. And, if you listen to the prayers of those who 
think they are civilized, you will notice that some are chiefly 
begging; others are all thanks; a third devotee is almost 
wholly wrapt in awe; still another seems all aspiration. 
And these differences, as I have said, all turn on the per- 
sonal characteristics of those who pray, and on their con- 
ception of the kind of god to whom the prayer is directed. 
Prayer, in this, is like all other human activities : it will 
adapt itself, in the long run, to the supposed conditions of 
success. As a man does not conduct his business in what 
he knows to be a useless and hopeless way, so neither does 
he order his prayers in a way that he knows to be useless. 
If a man asks for rain or health or victory in battle or a 
good harvest, it is because he believes there is somebody 
who hears, and who, for the asking, can be prevailed on to 
grant the request. 

Now, this kind of prayer was perfectly consistent to the 
mind of the primitive man ; for his gods were beings of the 
sky, of the air, of the earth, who, though outside of nat- 
ural forces, still had some mysterious control over them, 
and could bring about whatever results they pleased. They 



Shall We Pray to Him ? 121 

were a sort of irresponsible despots. If in some way you 
could prevail upon them, get their interest or consent, the 
thing would be done. Substantially, the same idea has pre- 
vailed in the popular mind until the present time. The 
Hebrew Jehovah was a being outside of the natural world, 
who had created it, and who ruled it as a subject kingdom- 
Affairs went on after a certain natural fashion, unless he 
chose for some reason to interfere. But there were ways 
by which it was supposed he could be induced to bring to 
pass all sorts of things that, in the natural order of events, 
would never have happened. The same was supposed to 
be true of the old pagan deities. If you could get on the 
right side of JEolus by a present or through the intercession 
of some other god, he would make his winds blow in the 
direction in which you wished your ships to sail. If you 
could gain the favor of Juno or Venus, you could count on 
their help in a battle. And so, in their sphere, of all the 
rest. And the matter has not been different in popular 
Christianity. God has been regarded as a being outside 
of Nature, has been set over against it, and sometimes almost 
put in opposition to it. In the popular philosophy, Nature 
goes on her way, working out certain uniform and unfeeling 
results; but " prevailing prayer " has a mysterious power 
over God, and can induce him to bring to pass a thousand 
results that, but for the asking, would not take place. From 
the weather and the crops up to the fate of nations and of 
souls, God is supposed to interfere at the request of men, 
and to do things he would not else have done. According 
to the popular phrase I have often heard, " Prayer is the 
power that moves the arm that moves the world." 

What now is the battle between prayer and modern sci- 
ence ? Objections of one kind or another against the cruder 
forms of prayer have been made by the more thoughtful in 



122 God. 

all ages. But the growth of modern science ana philosophy 
has set the whole question in a new light. Science and the 
popular ideas of prayer cannot possibly live together. They 
are mutually exclusive, and one or the other must die. He 
who believes that modern science is well grounded must re- 
consider this question. I said, a little while ago, that in all 
ages prayer had always adapted itself to the prevailing con- 
ception of God, and his relation to the universe. The point, 
then, for us to consider now, is this, — that the growth of mod- 
ern science has totally changed this conception. Science is 
not a passing notion of certain eccentric men. It is not 
something foisted on to the universe. It is simply finding 
out, so far as it goes, what the nature of the universe is. 
Now, science has discovered and verified, beyond intelligent 
question, what has been called " the reign of law." That is, 
this universe is a cosmos, the scene of an unvarying and 
universal order. Law is not a something that governs the 
world : it is only a name for the changeless method by which 
the power that does govern it works. As science looks at it, 
God is not a power outside of nature, who can be in some 
way prevailed on to come in and change it or produce results 
outside of the natural order. He is this law, this order, in 
his own personality. Or, to change the phrase, this law, this 
order of nature, is only another name for his habits of life 
and work. The throbbing, pulsing life that thrills through 
all the world is the living God himself, present and working 
in all. Do you not see the position then ? When now I beg 
of God to modify a natural law, I am asking him to be some- 
thing else than he already is by the eternal necessity of his 
being. And this is not true prayer : it is rather impiety. 

The popular conception of prayer then, which is a sur- 
vival of the older and exploded philosophy, is irrational 
and out of place in our modern knowledge of the world. 



Shall We Pray to Him ? 123 

Let us look at a few of the reasons that enforce this posi- 
tion. 

In the first place, when a man prays that something be 
done for him, for the mere asking, independently of natural 
causation, whether he thinks as to what it means or not, he 
is making the not over-modest request that a miracle be 
wrought for his own personal behoof. To pray for good 
health or for a safe voyage at sea or for rain, and so to ex- 
pect that some power outside of nature will, because of the 
uttered words, do something that mere knowledge of and 
obedience to natural laws would not do, — this, I say, is to 
look for a miracle. To make the matter as clear as possible, 
let us take for illustration the case of the weather. The 
condition of the weather over this city of Boston this morn- 
ing is the last link in a chain of causation that reaches back 
into infinity. To add to or take away from the atmosphere 
— except by human agency — one single drop of moisture 
would be a miracle as stupendous in its significance as the 
uprooting of Mount Washington and hurling its huge bulk 
into Portland Harbor. 

But man himself can modify the weather and even change 
the climate of a whole district ; and may not God do as much ? 
Certainly, man can modify the weather by a change of the 
natural conditions, as in cutting down forests or draining 
marshes ; or he may affect atmospheric conditions by a pro- 
longed cannonade. But, in so doing, he only works in ac- 
cordance with natural law. Mere asking or willing does not 
produce the results. And, so long as God is thought of as a 
being separate from the natural laws of the world, of course 
we can suppose him to act in a similar manner. But our 
God is not separate from these natural laws. These natural 
laws are a part of his ways, and they are only a name for his 
uniform method of working. The cases, then, are not at all 
parallel. 



124 God. 

Is it really a loss to give up the idea that we can change 
the weather by prayer? We have a Weather Bureau that 
studies all the natural conditions, and is thus able, with 
wondrous accuracy, to announce the great changes, the com- 
ing of storms and the rapidity and direction of the winds. 
On our knowledge of these things there depend every week 
thousands of lives and millions of dollars' worth of property. 
Suppose now that some unknown man's prayers were con- 
stantly liable to upset it all, would it really be a sign of 
beneficence on the part of God ? One of the things I am 
thankful for every day is that God, even in his apparent 
severity, is so much kinder to us than our own whims and 
fancies and follies would ask him to be. Now, precisely this 
same principle applies to our expectation that, in any direc- 
tion, God will, for our asking, suspend or interfere with his 
own natural order. 

This leads us to note another absurdity. A large part of 
this kind of praying is pure selfishness, and goes on the sup- 
position that God is capricious and partial, and may be so 
worked upon by our petition as to show us a piece of favorit- 
ism that, at the same time, will be detrimental to some one 
else. Suppose I am sailing to Europe, and I pray for favorable 
winds. Can I prevail on God to forget that somebody else, 
in as great a hurry as I am, is sailing in just the opposite 
direction ? Or suppose my farm is sandy, and I am anxious 
for rain : my neighbor's farm may have a clayey soil, and the 
rain I pray for will spoil half his crops. Whose prayer will 
he answer out of the infinity of those that are contradictory ? 
Or will he, like a Congressman anxious for re-election, be 
governed by the wishes of the majority ? This latter idea 
has been gravely argued by certain learned doctors of divin- 
ity. Is it not a little better, after all, for us to be able to 
count on a natural order, and learn, each for ourselves, to 
adapt ourselves to the peculiarity of our conditions ? 



Shall We Pray to Him ? 125 

Then, again, much of our common praying is asking God 
to put a premium on ignorance and blundering and laziness. 
Suppose, for instance, I eat and drink all sorts of hurtful 
things, and then, when I get ill, ask God to make me well 
again. What am I doing ? These laws and conditions of 
health are God's laws and conditions. Through these, he is 
every day telling me how to get well and to keep well. And 
to suppose that I can be well while these laws of health are 
broken is as absurd as to suppose that a broken organ will 
produce good music. What would you think of a musician 
who should take a hammer and pound his piano keys, and 
then pray to God to make it as good as new again ? You would 
be apt to think a lunatic asylum the proper place for him. 
But this sort of lunacy underlies the prayer of many a man 
who thinks it only a proof of piety. Or suppose again I 
fail to study the nature of the soil on my farm, and so to find 
out what manures are fitted for it and what crops it will best 
produce, and then, as the old farmer did, go all over my 
field and pray in every separate corner that God, outside of 
natural channels, and to save me the trouble of learning his 
own ways, will give me a crop such as the natural conditions 
would not produce? Or, once more, suppose I go to sea 
in a hulk that is not seaworthy, or in a ship not properly 
equipped or manned, or that I have not built my ship in 
accordance with the conditions of fast sailing, and suppose 
that now I pray that God will let me escape the natural 
results of my own stupidity ? Do you not see that, in all 
these cases, I am asking God to be what he is not, to do 
what he ought not, to contradict himself in order to save 
me the trouble of learning his ways ? 

Such prayer as this, and a great deal that goes under the 
name, is simply impiety. Remember, the natural laws and 
methods of the universe are the present, living God. Here 



126 God. 

is the point to keep constantly in mind. If God is perfect, — 
and, if he is not, he is not God, — then to ask him to change 
is to expect that, to please you, he will become something less 
than perfect. It is an assumption on your part that you can 
give God valuable advice. As if a fly on the dome of St. 
Peter's should suggest an improvement to Michael Angelo ! 
When Colonel Ingersoll suggested as an improvement to the 
universe that "good health should be made catching instead 
of disease," he overlooked the somewhat important fact that 
good health is catching already. And much of the good 
advice that is given to God, in more orthodox quarters, for- 
gets quite as important facts. What, for example, can be 
more drearily impertinent, to call it nothing worse, than the 
staple of ordinary public prayer that gives a weary half-hour 
of the congregation's time to telling the Lord in detail all 
about the condition of the parish and the affairs of the gov- 
ernment and the condition of the world in general, all which 
it is to be presumed he knows something about already ? 
Like the minister Mr. Weiss tells us of, who said, " O Lord, 
thou knowest not half the wickedness that is going on in this 
town ! " Or think for a moment of the scene in Tremont 
Temple the other day, when the Rev. Mr. Mallalieu, stand- 
ing in the presence of the Infinite Majesty, before whom 
angels veil their faces, stooped to flinging mud and calling 
names concerning a "brother in the Lord" and in the 
church, because of an honest difference of opinion on a 
matter of practical reform. A squabble of small boys in the 
presence of a king on reception-day would have been no 
more undignified. And, in all sincerity, I am of opinion that 
the drunken drayman on the street, swearing at his horses, 
was even less profane. 

Or take another phase of ordinary public prayer. It goes 
on the assumption that God cares less for his own world and 



Shall We Pray to Him ? 127 

the souls of his children than the churches do. The con- 
stant impression made is that a revival might be started, 
souls might be saved, the gospel might be carried to the 
heathen, and so they be saved from hell, if only a sufficient 
pressure could somehow be brought to bear upon the Al- 
mighty. It is assumed all the while that he might, by simply 
an act of will, do infinitely more than he is doing ; but he 
will not until he is besieged and begged and importuned. 
What but this is the meaning of the "week of prayer "? If 
the churches only unite " in a long pull, a strong pull, and a 
pull altogether," they can somehow get the Almighty started. 
He sits in heaven and sees souls drop, a ceaseless shower of 
hissing agony, into hell : he might save them by a breath of 
his mouth ; but he won't, until the churches tire him out with 
teasing. If God were such as that, I should hold him in 
contempt. But, since he is not, he must hold the churches 
in contempt for thinking so. Are men really better than 
God ? Suppose I should go to some loving, tender mother, 
and beg and plead with her to treat her children decently, — 
to be kind to them, to clothe them, and look after their little 
wants. It would mean one of two things : that I intended to 
insult her \ or that I was so nearly a fool as not to know what 
I was doing. I remember a prayer I used to hear in my boy- 
hood. One phrase, repeated in all prayer-meetings year after 
year, has burned itself into my memory. A good brother 
used always to say, " It is time for thee, O Lord, to work ! " 
As though the Omnipotent needed his elbow jogged, — was 
asleep, or had forgotten about it ! If I did not believe God 
was doing all and the best possible under the circumstances, 
I would never pray to him again. 

And then, once more on this point, there exists no satis- 
factory evidence that prayer, in this ordinary sense, is ever 
answered. I am perfectly well aware that whole books have 



128 God. 

been written full of wondrous answers to prayer, and that 
it is a frequent topic in the religious papers. But the proof 
is always about on a level with that which is used to prove 
that dreams are fulfilled, and that " signs " always come true. 
There is not one of them that cannot be explained by the 
ordinary laws of causation. The hits are all remembered, 
and the misses forgotten. 

As a concrete illustration, and one near by, take the case of 
Dr. Cullis' Consumptives , Home. The good doctor claims, 
and no doubt thinks, that he cures disease by prayer. The 
Bible certainly indorses the idea ; and no one who believes 
in its infallibility ever ought to call a doctor. Indeed, the 
New Testament actually forbids it. It commands any one 
who is sick to send not for a physician, but for the elders 
of the church ; and not to give medicine or even to regulate 
diet or look after sanitary matters, but to anoint with oil 
and pray. I would like to see some consistent Orthodox 
defend the doctor's calling. It goes right in the face of that 
which they call the "Word of God." There is a curious 
condition of things in England to-day. A little sect called 
the " Peculiar People " attempts to follow this Bible com- 
mand in cases of disease. And the British nation, calling 
itself Christian, and holding up the Established Church and 
the infallible Bible by law, at the same time prosecutes 
and sends to jail these same people because they obey the 
Bible. Such is the consistency of those who feel bound to 
reconcile absurdities. 

But to recur to Dr. Cullis. He claims to cure disease by 
prayer. It is noteworthy, in the first place, that such men 
only treat chronic diseases where the imagination of the 
patient plays a large part, and where, under favoring con- 
ditions, the recuperative forces of the system may be largely 
depended on. No one ever tried to set a broken limb by 



Shall We Pray to Him ? 129 

prayer. But even many of these cases die. It is always 
open, however, to say that the prayer was somehow amiss, 
had not faith enough, or lacked the right spirit, or else that 
it was not God's will in that special instance. But, if the 
person gets well, without much investigation of natural 
causes, it is all attributed to the prayer. This is about 
as rational as the trial of witches by the ordeal of water. 
If they floated, they were guilty and put to death ; if not, 
they were drowned in the trial, and so were got rid of 
anyway. 

Now, it may very well be that a sick man's faith in prayer, 
and the knowledge that others are in sympathy with him and 
praying for him, may rouse the energies of his system and 
send a new thrill of life through his frame. But all this is 
perfectly natural, and depends on no aid outside of nature. 
Is it therefore well to cultivate a delusion that is sometimes 
beneficial ? No : for, in many more cases, this looking for 
help by magic turns away the attention from the real causes 
of disease and health, and so kills a hundred to one that it 
cures. 

George Miiller, in England, has become famous for his hos- 
pital, that he claims to support purely by prayer. But it is 
easy enough to explain the success of such a movement. It 
needs nothing more than to be known by the great multi- 
tudes of sympathetic and generous souls. To be a real test, 
it ought to be done without any one's knowing it, except him 
who prays. Miss Mary Carpenter, of London, w r as one day 
talking with a person who claimed to be doing a work like 
this. Said she, "When some person contributes fifty pounds 
a year toward the support of your institution, do you count 
that as in answer to your prayers ? " " Certainly," she replied. 
"But," added Miss Carpenter, "in such cases as that, I 
always put the sums down in my list of annual contribu- 
tions." 



1 30 God. 

The events, then, that are called answers to prayer, can all 
be explained in perfectly natural ways ; and I, for one, 
should hate to believe otherwise. One person prays in an 
agony of soul and with falling tears, and God hears and 
sends relief. Another cries out of an equal need and sor- 
row, and the heavens are silent or deaf. Must I think it is 
whim or caprice ? Or may I believe that it is not in this way, 
after all, that God works ? If so, a great burden is lifted off 
my faith and my heart. Look at the condition of Ireland 
during the past year. Hundreds starving, and with dry lips 
crying for food ; white-faced mothers looking with anguish 
on babes whose pinched faces tell of breasts that no longer 
are fountains of life, — and all for lack of bread. Meantime, 
heaven is stormed with prayer ; and God hears, and answers 
by miracle. But what is the miracle? Not food, but ghosts 
of the Virgin and saints haunting old churches, and seen 
by hysterical women and superstitious priests. Must we 
accept such a God as that ? God answers prayers for deliv- 
erance from famine just as soon and as fast as men learn 
the laws of agriculture, or complete means of communica- 
tion, by which coming want may be foreseen and provided 
against. 

But, now that this conception of prayer is demolished, 
is nothing left? Is anyone asking: Do you not, then, be- 
lieve in prayer ? And, if you do not, why do you go through 
the form ? My answer is unhesitating and clear : I believe 
in prayer with my whole heart. And this without any jug- 
glery of words, without any "paltering in a double sense, 
that keeps the word of promise to the ear and breaks it to 
the hope." 

Prayer is not all asking. Even in its primitive and 
crudest form, we found it to comprehend awe and adoration 
and communion and offering. But these things all admit. 



Shall We Pray to Him ? 131 

It is not around these that difficulties cluster. So I shall 
pass them by with this word of recognition. Remember that 
that may be the noblest of all prayer which trusts so com- 
pletely that it asks for nothing. But as it is about that 
definition of prayer that confines it chiefly to petition that 
all the great problems gather \ and, as it is my present task 
to try to solve these problems, I shall confine my discus- 
sion to this. 

The instinct of prayer, in this sense, is universal. Men 
have always prayed everywhere. It is a pertinent and im- 
portant question then for us to ask as to whether this univer- 
sal instinct is simply a mistake. Does it spring entirely out 
of ignorance, and will a truer knowledge sweep it all away ? 
If so, we must face it. We do not want to fool ourselves. 
We shall get on better by knowing things as they are. 

But, if this instinct be unfounded, it will be so strange an 
exception to all others as to make it a greater wonder than 
if it were true. What is an instinct? Instinct is nothing more 
nor less than experience become organic and hereditary. It 
has been created by the nature of things. We stand to the 
all encompassing God in the universe in substantially the 
same relation in which a gold coin stands to the die that 
shapes and stamps it. A universal element of human 
nature has been created by the reality of things outside of 
us, and must answer to that reality as the eye answers to 
the light that made it. To say, then, that this instinct of 
prayer means nothing and points to nothing, seems to me as 
irrational as to say that the turning of the compass-needle 
means nothing, because you cannot find or shut up in a box 
the magnetic power that turns it toward the poles. Now, 
then, just what does it mean ? We have found that it can- 
not rationally mean the old and popular notion. What else 
is left ? Let us see if we cannot sink a plummet that will 
touch hard bottom. 



132 God. 

All life hungers. It reaches out, like a flower toward the 
sun, for that on which to feed and by which it may grow. 
Man's total nature, from the lowest physical appetite clear 
up through the mental and moral, until his highest spiritual 
aspiration exhales like a fragrance toward God, is one grand 
petition. It hungers ; it wants ; it reaches out pleading 
hands toward that which is the fountain of all supply. The 
body asks, the mind asks. The need for truth, the need for 
beauty, the need for happiness, the need for good, — all 
these are so many stretched palms and pleading lips. This 
is no mere figure of speech. Our total being asks of the 
universe, the God, about us ; and, if we ask aright, the an- 
swer comes. This is the root and essence of prayer, whether 
a word is spoken or not. In the words of the old hymn, 
supplemented to make it broad enough : — 

" Prater is the soul's " — 

or the body's or the mind's, the artistic or the scientific 

nature's — 

"sincere desire, 
Uttered or unexpressed ; 
The motion of a hidden fire 
That trembles in the breast." 

We are asking God for something every moment of every 
day, and with every faculty of our being that is alive. Every 
desire, every effort to get, is a veritable prayer. If we pray 
with our lips, it is only to give voice to the petition that 
existed before it was uttered. And the reliance on "much 
speaking " has been severely condemned by what in the 
Church at least ought to be ultimate authority; and that on 
the ground that God "knows what things we have need of 
before we ask him." 

But a large part of our prayers are not answered, while 
some of them are. What, then, is the condition of a favor- 



Shall We Pray to Him ? 133 

able response ? The condition is simple, so simple that it is 
a wonder that people seek it so far away, and do not find 
it. To make it clear, I must repeat, and ask you carefully 
to remember what I have already said, that the laws and 
forces of nature all about us and in us, in the heavens over 
our heads and in the earth under our feet, — that these are 
the pulsing, throbbing life and presence of God himself. If 
we want this God to answer our prayer then, and give us 
what we need, we must ask or seek in accordance with these 
laws, on whatever plane of life our desire may happen to be. 
Suppose we want to raise a cabbage in our garden. Here is 
the living, present God in soil and sunshine, in rain and dew, 
telling us to ask aright, and he will answer. But he does 
not make cabbages grow on stones or drop down out of a 
blue sky ; and he does not make them grow for mere verbal 
asking. To demand that he shall is to insult him by asking 
that he abandon his way, and adopt your whim in place of it. 
But do you say, This is not God giving, but your raising of 
cabbages ? Whose, then, are the soil and air, and sun and 
rain ? With God's part 6i it left out, how much could you 
do ? Suppose you are in a house somewhere, and are suffer- 
ing with thirst. You pray for water. A friend suggests that 
you turn a faucet, and help yourself : does that exclude God 
as the source of supply ? All God's oceans and winds have 
filled the reservoirs ; and the universe, with its everlasting 
laws, hastens to brim your cup. Some old proverb-maker has 
said, " The farmer may pray, but he must do it with his hand 
on the plough-tail." The hand on the plough-tail is prayer 
in the material realm, and as pertaining to the work of the 
farmer. It is asking in the only way that will make God 
hear. 

Precisely the same principle holds clear up through from 
lowest to highest. Knock at nature's door for a scientific 



134 God. 

truth ; knock in accordance with the law of that department 
in which you are working : listen, and the answer will come. 
The truth shall be yours. So in the moral realm. Not by 
mere lip-asking do people become good, but by obedience 
to the laws of goodness. What else does Jesus mean when 
he says, " Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after right- 
eousness ; for they shall be filled"? In this, the only 
rational and the only really reverent and pious sense, it is 
true that "he that asketh receiveth, he that seeketh findeth, 
and to him that knocketh it shall be opened." In this sense, 
importunity finds a reason : it is persistence in finding out 
God's way. But in the common sense, that of pleading with 
and tiring out God, it is not only nonsense, but impiety. 

When w r e get up into the highest and most ethereal spirit- 
ual realms, the same law holds. Spiritual gifts come as the 
result of our finding out the divine conditions and complying 
with those conditions. 

All prayer, thus, from lowest to highest, so far as we are 
able to find and obey its law, will infallibly be answered. 
And not only is this true, but it is also true that nothing ever 
comes except in this way. Prayer, in the true sense of that 
word, is the condition of all receiving, in every department 
of human life. The feeling of desire, the hunger, the reach- 
ing out, this is the first step toward all things. So the desire 
is felt, and the appropriate action follows, it may be a matter 
of indifference whether it find utterance in words or not. 
But the prayer must precede the attainment. God will not 
give anything, bread or goodness, for the mere asking ; but, 
if we ask aright, he will give all we need. 

There is time now for only one or two practical words. 

And first, if the doctrine I have set forth be the true one, 
is verbal prayer ruled out? Not at all, it seems to me. 
The essence of the prayer is, of course, in the emotion, the 



Shall We Pray to Him f 135 

desire ; but the expression of our emotion in appropriate 
ways is one of the most natural things in the world. We 
sing when we are happy, we sigh when we are sad. Why 
not pray when we hunger with unfed longings ? And I be- 
lieve we may properly pray for any and all things, provided — 
but this is most important — that we only remember that we 
are thus only pouring out our hearts into the great heart of 
God ; and that this mere asking is not and cannot be a substi- 
tute for that which is the essence of prayer. Let us see if 
this is irrational. I prize my baby's prattle, though it be only 
prattle. It is my child's life reaching out and up to mine. 
I am not offended even when a child asks something I can- 
not give. And, in relation to our child-life toward God, it 
may very well and very often be that the asking kindles and 
intensifies the desire that makes the prayer, and that this de- 
sire so changes the relation in which we stand to God that 
channels are opened that had else remained shut, and that 
through these channels streams of good may flow down that 
else had not been received. 

And, even if the prayer be not answered, it may not be all in 
vain. I go to a friend and pour out my heart to him, tell him 
my cares and burdens. He may not be able to touch them 
with even his little finger ; but the thought of sympathy, the 
escape from the sense of loneliness in sorrow, even this may 
be unspeakable relief. So, if I take my care to God, and may 
be permitted to feel that he cares for me, and that the infi- 
nite heart thrills with a tender sense of my burden. Though 
it may not be best that I cease to bear it, and his very love 
approve my sorrow, still this sense of divine sympathy is 
unspeakably helpful. Until, then, some one can assure me 
on unimpeachable authority that God does not feel nor care, 
I cling to this prayerful instinct that the universe itself is 
responsible for ; and I will still believe that it means what 
it seems to mean. 



136 God. 

But, lastly, what of public prayer? Does that need any 
defence ? A great deal that goes by the name is indefensi- 
ble. It would be strange if any minister did not sometimes 
step over the limits of the reasonable. I doubt not I often 
offend. Jesus condemned the prayer that was intended to 
be " seen of men." But this does not touch the service of a 
sincere minister. Instead of praying to be seen or listened 
to merely, addressing an eloquent prayer to the audience, he 
seeks rather to be lost in the audience. The ideal prayer is 
simply a sympathetic voicing of the common aspirations and 
the common needs. It is not I, it is we. He gathers up 
and condenses into a cloud the spiritual exhalations of the 
people, that they may descend again in gentle and refreshing 
showers. 

If then we be men and women of true and tender hearts, 
if we love our friends, if we aspire toward the things that are 
above us, if the touch of sympathy binds us to our kind, so 
that we feel the groaning and travailing of the creation that 
waits to be delivered, then we cannot help praying in our 
hearts; and, since the lips are only keys on which the fingers 
of the emotions play, they will be sure, first or last, to utter 
themselves in words. 

" For what are men better than sheep or goats, 
That nourish a blind life within the brain, 
If, having hands, they lift them not in prayer, 
Both for themselves and those who call them friends 
For so the whole round earth is every way 
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God." 



The Glory and the Shame of Atheism. 



The orthodox Christian tells us that " a dying God " is the 
necessary condition of human salvation. With a meaning 
quite other than his, and in a sense far more profound, the 
saying is true. Only we will put the word in the plural, and 
say, not only one god, but many, even all the gods of the 
past and the present, must die in order that man may be 
saved. The gods have thrived and grown great, have dom- 
inated the world and held it in stagnant subjection, because 
they have fed on human superstition and ignorance and fear. 
As Apollo was fabled to shoot his arrowy shafts of light 
through the night-dragons that opposed the coming of day, 
so the shafts of an ever-brightening intelligence must slay 
the old-time gods, if a better day is to dawn for the religious 
life of the world. Only as the gods die is a higher life re- 
born for man. 

Am I then, after all, an atheist in disguise ? If what I 
have now uttered be atheism, I am. Find me any great 
religious reformer of the past, one whose name stands as 
marking an epoch in the advance of the world, and I will 
show you that he was an atheist, as judged by the standards 
and accusations of his age. It is this atheism of the past 
that has been the salvation of the world. A history of it is 
a history of earth's heroes. It is the most significant and 



138 God. 

hopeful page in the record of humanity. This noble athe- 
ism is the glory of the world. As Wordsworth sung of the 
poets, so would I of the so-called atheists of the past : — 

" Oh ! might my name be numbered among theirs, 
Then gladly would I end my mortal days ! " 

But I am anxious that you should understand me aright. 
Do I believe in God? I believe in nothing else so much. 
How, then, can I speak thus about atheism ? Listen a 
moment, and see. Dismiss for a little all thought of what 
God may be in himself, and ask yourselves what, at any 
period of the world's history, he must be in relation to the 
thought of man. In the nature of things, he can be only an 
ideal ; and he may be nothing more than an idol. If only a 
traditional image, — whether in the mind or out of it, — an 
idol ; if framed of all fresh, living, and advancing thought, 
still only an ideal. The necessity of this springs out of the 
fact that God is the infinite, and that man is finite. Being 
finite, of course we can have only a finite image or thought 
of that which, on all sides, must transcend all thought. As 
far as it goes, and for all practical purposes, it may be cor- 
rect enough ; but it must forever fall short of reality. If, 
then, the human mind and the religious life grow, they must 
forever be shedding and casting off their old ideals, as the 
trees drop their last year's leaves. A broader knowledge will 
slay the old ideal that a new, a higher, and one more nearly 
approximating reality may take its place. 

We sometimes make a difficulty out of this, as though it 
were peculiar to the question of our knowledge of God. But 
it is only the eternal condition of all knowledge. We are 
never sure — if we are wise — that we know anything com- 
pletely. And, when new knowledge comes, it always brings 
with it the necessity for a readjustment of our old conceptions 



The Glory and the Shame of Atheism. 139 

and the formation of a new ideal. For example, we each 
have our mental ideals of our friends, of the city in which we 
live, of America, of the world. We know that they are all 
made of partial knowledge. We do not thence conclude 
that these things do not exist, or that it is irrational to study 
them. We take the more reasonable course of cherishing 
our provisional ideal, while holding it ever ready for change 
or enlargement as experience and knowledge increase. 

So we have our ideal of God. But the greater part of the 
world has not yet learned that it is only an ideal. They con- 
found their mental notion with the reality. And this reality 
is to them so sacred that they dare not touch the shadow of 
it. The ideal becomes an idol that is blindly and slavishly 
worshipped. This idol they identify with God. When, then, 
some new prophet of a better day touches this idol, they 
attack him with rage and fear, — thinking him really an enemy 
of God, — and put him to death. Or, if he succeed in over- 
throwing the idol, they think religion is dead, and the uni- 
verse is godless and hopeless. Oh, how many times has this 
dreary farce — by the stupid ignorance of religious fanatics 
turned into tragedy — been played over in the history of the 
world ! Let us call up a few illustrations, and thus see who 
the atheists of the past have been, and what they have done. 
Of course, it is only specimens of the long and illustrious 
line that we can notice. 

Looming up, huge and indistinct, on the far-off border of 
history, where the day fades into twilight, appears the grand 
figure of Abraham. And what is that he is doing? In 
obedience to what he feels is a higher call, he is leaving 
his old home, his father's house, his father's gods, and is 
going out, "not knowing whither." O Abraham, we bend 
before thee, and hail thee first in the long, historic proces- 
sion of religious heroes who have made what men call athe- 



140 God. 

ism a halo of divine glory ! His case presents all the typical 
features of that kind of atheism that religious contempora- 
ries so bitterly condemn. He turned his back on the old, 
the established, the traditionally sacred ; he left his father's 
gods ; he went out "all adrift," as they say, unsettled, to 
face doubt, to make a new and " modern " departure, " not 
knowing whither." To his friends, his people, his old co- 
religionists, the most sacred thought, convictions, and cus- 
toms of his time, he was an atheist. 

Moses, again, in the eyes of the most magnificent devel- 
opment that the religious life of the race had then achieved, 
was an atheist. Trained as a priest and prince of Egypt, 
he denied and turned his back upon all her gods and her 
religious hopes, and, with a despised rabble of slaves, went 
out into the wilderness. In after times, it was easy for his 
followers to say that it was because he sought "a better 
country"; but, to the most respectable religious opinion of 
his age, his position was that of a most despicable atheism. 

And Buddha, whose name, of all the teachers and leaders 
of the race, may claim to stand nearest to that of Jesus, — he, 
too, began his career by an outright and persistent denial 
of the claims of all the old Hindu gods. He treated them 
with contempt. Instead of praying to them, he even ques- 
tioned — so little did they help the world — as to whether 
they themselves might not stand in need of help. 

Zarathustra, the foundBr of one of the noblest religions the 
world has ever seen — he, too, was an atheist. Not only did 
he push the old gods from their thrones, he even made them 
the demons of his new scheme of the universe \ as, in later 
times, John Wesley is said to have told a Calvinist, " Your 
god is my devil." 

Anaxagoras, the man who hit upon one of the first great 
discoveries in science, who found out one of God's grand 



The Glory and the Shame of Atheism. 141 

facts, and taught that the sun was a ball of fire, — he, for this, 
was an atheist in Athens ; and, in punishment for his athe- 
ism, he was sentenced to death, though, at the intercession 
of powerful friends, the mercy of a life banishment was 
granted him. He is only the first in a long line of those 
who have been declared God's enemies for the crime of dis- 
covering God's ways. 

Socrates, the noblest man of Ancient Greece, was an athe- 
ist, and as such was condemned to the hemlock by his 
Athenian judges. He dared to believe in better gods than 
the people could think of or cared to worship. 

Jesus was an atheist; and, as they said, a blasphemer, a 
gluttonous man, a wine-bibber, a keeper of low company, 
a despiser of the temple, an enemy of all established religion 
and order. Why ? For precisely the same reasons for which 
to-day he is worshipped as a god. But those who claim, par 
excellence, to be his disciples, seem to learn little of his spirit. 
In spite of his warnings, — " Your fathers killed the prophets, 
and ye build their sepulchres " ; and again, "A prophet is not 
without honor save in his own country and in his own house," 
— they still cling to " tradition " which he despised, and con- 
demn all free thinking which he advocated. 

The very name for Christians among the Greeks and Ro- 
mans was " atheist." And atheists they were. They con- 
demned the gods, refused the popular worship, and opposed 
all the established religion of the age. 

And all down the Christian centuries the same truth 
appears. Find any man that marks an epoch of religious 
advance, and you stand face to face with an atheist. Arius 
and his followers were " devils, antichrists, maniacs, dogs, 
polytheists, leeches, atheists," in the eyes and on the tongues 
of Athanasius and his friends. Since Athanasius showed 
himself such an adept at cursing, it seems peculiarly appro- 



142 God. 

priate that the Athanasian creed, called after his name, 
should close with a " damnatory clause." 

Luther was an atheist in Rome. Servetus and Calvin 
both were atheists to their opponents. 

Giordano Bruno, the first man who in England taught the 
truth of the Copernican system, — the glory of God, and the 
commonplace of every school-boy now, — was burnt at the 
stake as an atheist and an enemy of the Bible. For a 
similar punishment for a similar crime, Galileo only escaped 
by a compulsory lie that was called a recantation ; though 
it is said he stamped his foot in anger, and muttered the 
truth as he rose from his knees. Magellan, too, was an 
atheist, because he trusted God's shadow of the earth on 
the face of the moon during an eclipse, and dared thus to 
assert, contrary to the Church, that the earth was round. 

One of the strangest and saddest illustrations of what 
was called atheism was the case of Vanini, who in 1619 
A.D. was condemned to be burnt alive. He declared we 
could not know God perfectly, unless we were ourselves 
God. But of Him he said, " He is the greatest good, the 
first Being, the whole, just, compassionate, blessed, calm; 
the creator, preserver, moderator, omniscient, omnipotent; 
the father, king, lord, rewarder, ruler ; the beginning, the 
end, the middle, the eternal. He alone is all in all." And 
this man, says Prof. Max Muller, was burnt as an atheist. 
And he was an atheist ; for he had denied the popular con- 
ception of God, and dared to believe he was better than the 
people supposed. 

Newton, too, was an atheist. When he demonstrated the 
law of gravitation, the clergy charged him with dethroning 
God, and putting the universe in the keeping of a law. 
The same stale charge they are constantly repeating con- 
cerning his illustrious successors. 



The Glory and the Shame of Atheism. 143 

The Church is not yet tired of circulating the falsehoods 
that became current concerning the famous Frenchman, 
Voltaire. He is the prince of modern atheists \ notwith- 
standing that he was, perhaps, the first man in modern Eu- 
rope who built and dedicated a church simply to God. 
From the Middle Ages down, the churches are St. Peter's or 
St. Somebody's, until Voltaire, the atheist, inscribes one 
Deo erexit Voltaire, — Voltaire erects this to God. But he 
was an atheist, for he denied the God of the Church. 

In all the pulpits of Christendom and in all her religious 
papers, Thomas Paine is vilified as an atheist and a denier 
of future hope for man. Yet he opens his famous book by 
saying, " I believe in one God \ and I hope for happiness 
beyond this life." His grand creed he summed up by say- 
ing, " The world is my country, and to do good is my relig- 
ion." But atheist he was ; and the Church, if she would 
save herself, was wise to fight him. 

We will close our long list with Theodore Parker. The 
three grand, central, alway repeated words of this great 
atheist were God, conscience, immortality. Concerning him, 
Dean Stanley has said that theological science owes to him 
more than to any man of the century. But the churches 
have branded infidel and atheist across the forehead of his 
memory. And thus he takes his place in the long and illus- 
trious line of those who have made atheism glorious. 

Who, then, were these men, and what did they do ? They 
were called deniers, negationists, destructives ; and the com- 
fortable, the settled, the conservative, have always hated 
such men, and, I suppose, always will. It is often said of 
such : " He has told us enough of that he does not believe. I 
wish now he would tell us what he does believe." So it was 
said of Jesus. His grand positive assertions of the father- 
hood of God, the brotherhood of man, salvation by love and 



144 God. 

character, — these were all forgotten. It was remembered 
only that he spoke against Moses and the temple. So now, 
in spite of the stale charge, that they are always denying, and 
never asserting, the so-called radicals of to-day are uttering 
more positive and constructive truth than any other body 
of men. 

Why were these men atheists? For the simple reason 
that, with a larger love and a larger trust in man and in God, 
they dared deny the old and popular conceptions in the 
interest of a broader, grander, and higher truth. Take as 
a present parallel the attitude of those who deny a literal, 
fiery hell, and proclaim eternal hope for man. They are 
deniers. Yes. What do they deny ? That God is a fiend, 
or is impotent. What do they assert? A conception of God 
so much grander than the old that by comparison the old is 
a hideous idol. But their very love and faith make them 
atheists to their time. They see and know that only as the 
old God is killed off can humanity advance to a higher trust. 
Yet, of course, those who still believe in the old must regard 
them as atheistic. To them, they are so. 

It may at first seem strange that the very best and noblest 
men of any age must seem wicked to that age. But the 
cause is simple enough. The average man must judge his 
fellows by the conventions and standards of his time. He 
who loves more than they do, must love some things that 
they regard as unlovely, and think he ought to hate. He 
who trusts more than they do, must put faith in things that 
they think unworthy of it. He must do and say things that 
they have been accustomed to condemn. Not only was it so 
with Jesus; but, in any department of thought or life, it 
must ever be so in the case of him who runs ahead, and so 
gets out of sympathy with his age. They have no rules 
large enough to measure him by, and so they pronounce him 



The Glory and the Shame of Atheism, 145 

monstrous. It is so in art and .science and morals and phi- 
lanthropy, as well as in religion. 

" The man is thought a knave or fool, 

Or bigot plotting crime, 
Who, for the advancement of his kind, 

Is wiser than his time. 
For him the hemlock shall distill ; 

For him the axe be bared ; 
For him the gibbet shall be built ; 

For him the stake prepared. 
Him shall the scorn and wrath of men 

Pursue with deadly aim ; 
And malice, envy, spite, and lies 

Shall desecrate his name. 
But truth shall conquer at the last ; 

For round and round we run, 
Arid ever the right comes uppermost, 

And ever is justice done." 

In a similar strain sings Lowell : — 

" Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne ; 
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown 
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own. 

It must always be so, until the world gets wise enough to 
know that all its best and highest thoughts of God are only 
provisional, and that the advancing experience and growing 
knowledge of man is a perpetually unfolding revelation, in 
the light of which all previous thought must continuously be 
corrected and readjusted. Who now would set up again on 
their pedestals the old and moss-grown gods of India, of 
Persia, of China, of Greece, of Rome, of Britain ? Yet, 
when they fell, their worshippers were confounded, and sent 
up a cry as though the end of all things had come. Who 
would rekindle the old altars on which the ashes for centu- 
ries have grown cold? Who, again, would listen for the 
silent voices that once gave divine oracles at Delphi or 



146 God. 

Dodona? It was needful that these gods should die in 
order that man might live a higher life. And, if the world 
is to see any higher or brighter future, it is just as needful 
that the popular gods of to-day should also be pushed from 
their thrones to make way for higher and better ideals. It 
is impossible that man should become much better than the 
God he really worships. But the popular ideal of God 
to-day is not so good as the highest type of man. His 
thoughts are not so high as our thoughts, nor his ways so 
loving as our ways. Men are perpetually wishing he was 
better, and praying to him to be better and kinder than he 
is. Humanity stands back to the light, looks toward the 
past, and bends in worship before a crystallized and mum- 
mified ideal of barbaric times. No good man would think 
of defending the God of the popular creeds, if he were 
found in any other religion than our own. Tradition has 
sanctified, and made us afraid of him. But he is only an 
idol. And the real God is away ahead of us, beckoning 
us on and up along the living ways of his living universe. 
The only way then to be "a friend of God/' like Abraham, 
— a friend of the living and true God, — is to be an atheist 
toward the lower and imperfect ideals of the past. 

This, then, is the glory of atheism : that, at the cost of con- 
tumely and persecution and the scorn of the time, men have 
dared, and still dare, to listen to the word that came to 
Moses, and that comes to those who dare to hear in every 
age, " Speak to the children of Israel, that they go forward ! " 
Thus, it has come to pass that almost all the greatest and 
best men of history, those whose names stand for new ad- 
vances, have been cast out by their age. It seems strange 
that the world does not learn the lesson. As Peschel has 
said, " The true Creator, because he had acted on the plan 
pointed out by Copernicus rather than that of Ptolemy, was 



The Glory mid the Shame of Atheism. 147 

placed on the Index in the person of those who had made 
known his system of worlds. " And once more to-day, in 
the person of Darwin, the true Creator is scouted and ridi- 
culed because he did not make the world and man after the 
fashion that an unknown, barbaric Hebrew laid down for 
him. 

But because this atheism is holy and blessed, and has 
in it the germ of all future hope for man, is therefore all 
that goes by the name to be commended ? No, by no 
means. There is an atheism that is hopeless, that is 
despair, that is death. One face of that which we have 
thus far treated is true atheism, and should not shun the 
name • but the other face is the only true and hopeful the- 
ism. For, since all attainable conceptions must still be 
outgrown, if man does not stand still, the old must always 
die like last year's buds. It is only by thus "forgetting the 
things that are behind, and reaching forth toward those 
that are before," that a true and worthy thought and hope of 
God can be cherished. God is the always pursued, but 
never completely found. 

But, since there is a deadly atheism that is to be feared 
and shunned, it is needful for us to define it, so that we 
may be able to distinguish the shame of atheism from its 
glory ? What, then, is an atheist ? Let us look at the word. 
It covers both types, for it means simply a god-denier. Any 
man, then, who denies another's god, is to him an atheist. 
But, in the ultimate analysis of it, in modern thought, it 
means one who denies the existence of any being to which 
the name God can properly be applied. In that sense, to- 
day, it is perhaps safe to say there are no intelligent athe- 
ists. In the language of the old Psalm, it is only " the fool " 
who is presumptuous enough to say "there is no God." And 
,iven he seems to have been sensible enough to keep it to 



148 God. 

himself ; for he only said it " in his heart " ; he did not talk 
it out among folks. I am aware that the pulpits and relig- 
ious newspapers are full of talk about " scientific atheism" ; 
and yet there is no circle of recognized scientific men in 
the world where a positive assertion of real atheism would 
not be challenged as foolish and unscientific. They would 
say, No man has a right to deny until he is sure he knows 
all there is in the universe. So wisely do the religious 
leaders of the time use words about a science that they do 
not take the trouble to understand! The most that any 
man would dare to say would be that he did not know. 
And some sensible people might be inclined to pardon that 
as modesty instead of scorning it as impiety. Science is 
helping to make fashionable what it is to be hoped may yet 
spread over the religious world, — a modest reticence and 
humility as to things it does not know. 

What, now, is the essence of the idea of God, the denial 
of which constitutes real atheism? In other words, what 
must a man deny to be an atheist in the bad sense of that 
word ? It is possible that he may deny the Buddhist god or 
the Chinese god or the Catholic god, or even your god and 
my god, and all the time be doing it in the interest of what 
he regards as a higher and better ideal. But the ultimate re- 
ality to which the name " God " really belongs is simply this, 
— a power outside of us, above us, and about us, by whose 
laws we are bound, in whose laws is life, in disobedience to 
whose laws is death. That is, any man who recognizes a law 
in him, and without him, which binds him under penalty to 
certain courses of action called right, such a man believes 
in the essential idea that underlies the word "God." What- 
ever else he doubts, — whether personality or consciousness 
or love, — so long as he believes in law, in obligation, in pen- 
alty, he believes in God. His God may not be so good, so 



The Glory mid the Shame of Atheism. 149 

loving, so hope-inspiring as mine \ but still such a man is no 
atheist. 

To the real atheist, the universe does not exist ; the cosmos 
has no meaning. The one, the order, has disappeared. Self 
is the only law, might makes right, obligation is emptied of 
meaning, — he is "without God, and" so "without hope in 
the world." An atheism such as this does really exist; but 
it is practical, not speculative. It is not formulated in books, 
for it has no intellectual basis. Perhaps it is safe to say that 
it is impossible to frame in intelligent language a system of 
intellectual atheism. The moment the realms of science and 
law are entered, the facts and laws themselves contradict the 
theory. But practical atheism is a reality. And, so far as it 
reaches, it is disastrous in its effects, and deserves all the 
opprobrium that has ever been cast upon the word. It is a 
thing of shame, the imputation of which any manly man 
would resent. I must briefly indicate its features, that we 
may learn to discern the real enemy of God and man. 

In the first place, it manifests itself as an ignorant and 
thoughtless, or conscious and intended, rebellion against the 
conditions and laws of life. These conditions and laws are 
the active, present God. He who allies himself with these 
laws and forces, gets them behind him, puts himself in accord 
with them, he becomes strong and mighty. He who opposes 
them must go under. This holds true whether the laws be 
in us or out of us, whether w r e call them material or mental 
or moral. Opposition to these is opposition to God, and so 
practical atheism. Whole races, famous men, and men not 
famous, have tried it, but have inevitably been ground to 
powder. Rome fell before it ; so did Napoleon ; so does an 
ill-constructed house, or the carelessly-made dam of a reser- 
voir. We must learn that we cannot carry our point against, 



150 God. 

outwit, or " get around " the universe. It is atheism to do 
other than learn and obey. 

As this atheism manifests itself in the sphere of morals, 
it is socially disastrous. Ignoring the law that binds us in 
duty and obligation to our fellows, we recklessly oppose the 
God who is "a power that makes for righteousness." For- 
getting that duties and obligations are mutual and recip- 
rocal, we obtrude ourselves into the sphere of the rights of 
others, and find ultimately here, also, that we not only hurt 
others, but equally destroy ourselves. This is the atheism 
that recognizes no binding power of right, that makes its 
own wilfulness dominant, and so seeks to dethrone the force 
that holds the world in order. 

Its ultimate and logical outcome is despair. Seeing no 
order, no law, no purpose in the drift of things, it comes at 
last to feel as if the world were like a dismasted and rudder- 
less ship in a storm at sea. It sails toward no harbor, but 
only drifts, the helpless and hopeless plaything of all aimless, 
but ultimately destructive forces. It is this state of mind 
out of which comes crime or suicide, or both. Crime is only 
a sort of despairing grasp at what one is hopeless of gaining 
in any orderly or legitimate way ; and suicide is only a giving 
up of a hopeless struggle with the inevitable. 

Real atheism, then, is weakness and despair, a lone battle 
against the nature of things. Theism is a recognition of the 
laws and forces of the world, and a conscious union with 
them in working out some worthy destiny. This is life and 
strength and eternal hope. 

The manly attitude, then, toward the dark problems that 
surround the being of God, is one of trust and growing faith. 
This faith and hope are rooted firmly in the experience of 
the past. They are justified by the experience of man. And, 
though many times yet the clouds of doubt gather about us, 



The Glory and the Shame of Atheism. 151 

let us not turn back, but boldly face and walk through the 
cloud. There were no cloud, were there not a sun; and 
the light is above and on the farther side of the cloud. 

" Lo, here is God, and there is God! 

Believe it not, O man ! 
In such vain sort, to this and that 

The ancient heathen ran. 
Though old Religion shake her head, 

And say, in bitter grief, 
The day behold, at first foretold, 

Of atheist unbelief, 
Take better part, with manlier heart, 

Thine adult spirit can ; 
Receive it not, believe it not, 

Believe it not, O man ! 

" Is there no prophet soul the while 

To dare, sublimely meek, 
Within the shroud of blackest cloud 

The Deity to seek ? 
'Midst atheistic systems dark, 

And darker hearts' despair, 
That soul has heard, perchance, His word, 

And on the dusky air 
His skirts, as passed He by, to see 

Hath strained on their behalf, 
Who, on the plain with dance amain, 

Adore the golden calf. 

" Take better part, with manlier heart, 

Thine adult spirit can ; 
No God, no Truth ? receive it ne'er, 

Believe it ne'er, O man ! 
But turn not then to seek again 

What first the ill began. 
No God, it saith : ah, wait in faith 

God's self-completing plan ; 
Receive it not, but leave it not, 

And wait it out, O man ! 



152 God. 



" Devout, indeed ! that priestly creed, 

O man, reject as sin! 
The clouded hill attend thou still, 

And him who went within. 
He yet shall bring some worthy thing 

For waiting souls to see ; 
Some sacred word that he hath heard 

Their light and life shall be ; 
Some lofty part, than which the heart 

Adopt no nobler can, 
Thou shalt receive, thou shalt believe, 

And thou shalt do, O man ! " 



The Intellectual Basis of Faith." 



BY W. H. SAVAGE. 

That we are living in a new age is a fact seen and con- 
fessed by all candid observers. That the systematized con- 
clusions of the past are to be revised, and in important 
respects modified, cannot well be doubted by any one who 
has noted the course of events. The seeming adamant of 
old foundations crumbles in the upheavals of long-impris- 
oned truth. In the focus of modern light, the old creeds of 

science and religion suffer 

" Change 
Into something " dim and " strange " ; 

and the amazed spectators of these transmutations hold their 
breath, fearing that they themselves, with all their hopes 
and fears, may presently turn out to be only 

" Such stuff 
As dreams are made on." 

Very momentous questions concerning the nature and 
destiny of man have been raised, and are to be in some 
fashion settled, in connection with debated questions in 
physical science. 

These questionings put into a single sentence, and one 
that utters the intensest feeling of the age, amounts to this : 

Are man's religious nature and history correlated to any dis- 
coverable and demonstrable facts of a spiritual universe ? Or, 
to put it in other words, Has man a right to be religious ? 

To multitudes, this question, boldly put, has the sound of 

* A " Phi Beta Kappa" address, delivered at Bowdoin College. 



1 54 The Intellectual Basis of Faith. 

an absurdity. Question as to the divine warrant of religion 
has never entered their minds. The question, however, has 
been raised, and must have its answer, — an answer grounded 
in reason and sustained by adequate witness of facts. 

Answer it has had. Very able, learned, and earnest 
men have given verdict in the negative. Others, also able, 
learned, and earnest, consent to find place in the future 
for a sentiment of religion, some vague awe of an unknow- 
able, a dim, dessicated ghost inhabiting the empty space 
between the tangible world and the abysm of the Infinite. 

Neither of these answers appears to be sustained by such 
testimony of facts as men now demand of theories that come 
seeking for favorable consideration. The old vindication of 
religion and the new denial alike fail to meet the demand of 
the inquirer of to-day. 

May we not then hope for attention to a view of the sub- 
ject that, so far as we are aware, has not heretofore been 
suggested? There are three ways in which religion may 
conceivably be justified and established : — 

Firstly. On the ground of a supernatural revelation. 

Secondly. On the ground of a direct intuition of spiritual 
facts. 

Thirdly. On grounds discovered and established by the 
method of science. 

If the first of these grounds is real and adequate, we need 
look no further. 

Until quite recently, the reality and adequacy of such 
infallible supernatural revelation have been affirmed or as- 
sumed by the great majority of Protestants. It has been 
held that the absolute and ultimate facts were given to the 
world in the Bible, and that the only thing required of man 
was the acceptance of what was therein given. Inquiry 
might proceed to the extent of ascertaining the contents of 



The Intellectual Basis of Faith. 155 

the revelation, but question as to the final authority of these 
contents was not tolerated. 

But the adequacy of this ground for religion is now reso- 
lutely questioned. It is seemingly impeached by the fact 
that other grounds have been and now are sought for by 
writers of religious apologetics. The very remarkable 
"Monday Lectureship " takes its stand openly on what it 
calls science, and claims the suffrages of believers on the 
basis, among other things, of the announcement that it 
knows of a microscope that " begins to have visions of im- 
mortality." The possibility of supernatural revelation being 
granted, debate still rages about the question whether the 
possible has ever emerged into the actual; and there are no 
signs of such a settlement as will give much solace or assur- 
ance to earnest minds. It is enough for our purpose to 
know that the anthropomorphic and miraculous religion of 
tradition has ceased to control and satisfy the minds which 
are giving direction to the inquiries of the modern world. 

We may therefore proceed to inquire how things stand 
with the second method of coming at the facts that underlie 
and authenticate religion. 

This may be sufficiently described by calling it the method 
of intuition. 

Coleridge, if not the founder of this method, may be said to 
be its most conspicuous representative in its modern form. 
The ground of religious obligation and hope is found by 
him in truth immediately, and in some ineffable way, seen. 
" Faith " to use his own words, " consists in the synthesis 
of the reason and the individual will. ... By virtue of the 
former (that is, reason), faith must be a light, a form of 
knowing, a beholding of truth." 

This, as I understand it, is in substance the doctrine of 
the modern members of the intuitional school. Says a 



156 The Intellectual Basis of Faith. 

recent very able writer, " My intuition is my looking upon 
reality y 

One of the first things that strikes us in glancing over the 
history of the Transcendental Philosophy is the fact that 
the results of the alleged direct vision of truth furnish a 
constantly narrowing foundation for a theological super- 
structure. At first there was room, according to Morell, "to 
ground the great doctrines of Christianity upon a philosophi- 
cal basis without . . . detracting aught from their peculiarly 
evangelical characters " ; but now the habitable area of the 
flying island, that after its eccentric voyaging seems about to 
dissolve into the mist from which it was compacted, scarcely 
suffices to sustain two or three half-finished columns of that 
imposing temple that was to shelter the human race. The 
religious bodies, that at one time seriously meditated the 
removal of their seminaries to this New World, have de- 
cided to remain where they were. If ever the shade of 
Coleridge revisits the scenes of his former theologizings, the 
men he meets are by no means distinguished for their zeal in 
church-building. They are known rather for their success in 
exterminating the unfortunate pioneers of the old faiths, who 
had come to spy out the land ; and now, having everything 
their own way, and feeling lonesome, they are seemingly 
looking for more worlds to conquer. 

The effort of Coleridge to find in the philosophy of Kant 
the means of making this philosophy deny its maker must, 
I think, be regarded as a failure. Allowing what I do not 
allow, that there is warrant in Kant's doctrine of the catego- 
ries of thought for the statement that there are "certain 
primal ideas and sentiments given in the constitution of the 
human mind," Kant holds that these ideas can have only a 
subjective validity, and that reasonings which assume the 
existence of corresponding objective realities of being are 



The Intellectual Basis of Faith. 157 

pure illusions. The reality of the soul, of the universe, of 
God, could, he held, by no process of the pure reason ever 
be established. To every argument adduced to prove ob- 
jective reality, he was ready to respond with unanswerable 
objection. Subsequent explorers following in the lines of 
his speculations have, so far as I know, added nothing to 
the known or the knowable by means of the transcenden- 
tal philosophy. Its total result is given in the Tennysonian 
maxim, "We have but faith: we cannot know"; and the 
final consolation of religion from this source is the rather 
unsatisfying reflection that, if she cannot demonstrate her 
right to live, nobody can prove that it is her duty to die. 
If this is the final word, there needs no special inspiration 
to foretell the event. In an age that had not seriously ques- 
tioned the reality and infallibility of revelation, that had 
fixed religious habits and traditions and a large accumu- 
lated capital of reverence, religion could maintain her an- 
cient prescriptive rights. But the world is becoming some- 
what crowded now. The veteran that " lags superfluous on 
the stage " finds small reverence. There is a visible weari- 
ness and impatience with institutions that merely apologize 
or challenge the world to produce the official text of the 
divine decree that orders them to vacate the premises. The 
Church's asseveration, that according to its best knowledge 
and belief there is the material for a rational and binding 
creed, if it could only find out where this material is, and 
then find out how to get it, will not avail as a final answer for 
those who see no real steps taken in the direction of either 
of these discoveries. We are in a world in whose struggle 
for "survival" the "fittest" is that which can show the best 
visible reason for continuing to be. 

We come now to the third on the list of possible grounds 
for religion, — discovery of truth by the scientific method. 



158 The Intellectual Basis of Faith, 

Man has been defined to be " a religious animal " ; and he 
has justified the definition in both its members, — the "ani- 
mal " as well as the " religious." 

We are informed by exponents of the more recent science 
that this definition was framed by man to fit a condition 
which had back of it an indefinite immensity of time, during 
which there was proceeding a growth toward the stage of 
self-conscious life, in which man could reflect on himself 
and give himself a name. Time was in this immensity when 
the "animal" was "religious," after a fashion very unlike 
the present. Back of that a time when there was simply an 
"animal" with "religious" possibilities, like the possibility 
of eyes in a creature merely sensitive to light, but with no 
developed organs of vision. This possibility has become 
now an organic fact. The religious factor in man has 
become the controlling element in the history of society. It 
has inspired oracles, organized institutions, created litera- 
tures, builded and destroyed civilizations. What was once 
held to be a Heaven-descended revelation is now said to 
be the product of the human mind. Man has himself 
created the thing he afterward attributed to his God, and in 
a sense the God to whom he attributed it. There is that 
in him that thinks things so divine that he has believed 
himself to have vision of the invisible God. The question 
that waits to be, answered is this : How shall these facts 
of human nature and experience be accounted for? The 
supposed supernatural revelation, the intuitional philosophy, 
did not, we are assured, create the things they sought to 
explain, but were themselves the creations of that for which 
they tried to account. 

My speech has already "bewrayed" me as an evolutionist. 
I frankly confess myself a believer in the essential doc- 
trines of Darwinism. Let it be understood, however, that 



The Intellectual Basis of Fait Ji. 159 

my aim is not to establish the evolutionary hypothesis or 
to justify the evolutionary philosophy. I accept these for 
the time being; and my aim will be to show that, being 
taken for granted, they furnish a firm ground for the super- 
structure of religion. 

Several times already in the history of the world, religion 
and society have found their saviors in those who were 
anathematized when they appeared, as the foes of both. 
Quite possibly, "the thing that has been is the thing that 
shall be " again. At present, it seems quite evident that re- 
ligion must live, if she lives at all, in a world that accepts 
the doctrines of evolution. It is plain, moreover, that, living 
in the same world, they must agree. 

Now, if religion is grounded in the facts of the world, 
there is the best of reasons for believing that essential and 
permanent religious facts will find their natural and most 
fitting expression in the language that gives expression most 
naturally and most adequately to the other related facts 
of the world ; for this universe is all of a piece, a kosmos. 
The clew that leads us in the real track of the divine order 
in the lowest ranges of being will, if held and followed, 
conduct us to the highest revealings of the universal life. 

Suppose, then, that we try the ascent from the plane 
of physical facts to the facts of man's spiritual experience, 
holding in our hands the clew of evolution. 

Our first task is to learn whether the accepted facts of 
religious experience will bear translation into the language 
of evolution, without suffering violence in the process. Not 
long since, a gentleman, in criticism of some of these ideas, 
remarked that they " translated accepted facts into the lan- 
guage of evolution, without giving to them any additional 
validity." 

Now let it be remarked here in advance that the scientific 



160 The Intellectual Basis of Faith. 

adherents to the hypothesis of evolution do not claim that 
their doctrines offer an exhaustive explanation of anything. 
Evolution stands as an hypothesis, and furnishes a method. 
Without attempting to answer the question of origin, it 
offers a solution of the subsequent question, How came 
the present out of the past? Its answer is: The world 
was not made by a kosmical carpenter. It has grown by 
natural and vital processes. This answer unifies the entire 
physical history of the planet. One fact grasped and under- 
stood furnishes the key to the whole immense order. Facts 
repugnant to all other hypotheses come into harmony under 
this ; law and order extend daily their joint empire over the 
ancient chaos. 

A vast gain has then been made when "the accepted 
facts " have been " translated into the language of evolu- 
tion." No "additional validity" has been given to these 
facts, and they need none. Facts can go alone. It is the 
theory that asks for " additional validity." And this "addi- 
tional validity " it gains, when the facts ask to be translated 
into its language. 

Now, if religious facts will bear translation "into the 
language of evolution," if they suffer no violence in such 
treatment, if, on the other hand, they fall into orderly rela- 
tion and natural sequence, we are justified, I submit, in 
holding : — 

i. That these facts are a part of the natural order of the 
world, and so reveal the working of a power in Nature which 
is distinctively related to the religious faculty in man. 

2. That we have found the true method by which to pros- 
ecute farther inquiry into the meaning of these facts. 

3. That we are justified in expecting to have some time a 
science of religion. 

4. That this science will harmonize w r ith and supplement 
physical science. 



The Intellectual Basis of Faith. 161 

5. That religion will stand with a demonstrated, divinely 
natural right to the highest place among the shaping forces 
of the world. 

These, it strikes me, are substantial gains, not to be 
despised, at any rate until there is something considerably 
better than the present chaotic and demoralized condition of 
religious thought. 

Now for the attempt at translation. 

"The hypothesis of evolution, " to quote Dr. Draper, 
" asserts that from one or a few original organisms all those 
that we see have been derived by a process of evolving or 
development. It will not admit that there has been any 
intervention of divine power." Assigning the original or- 
ganisms, evolution teaches us that these originals possessed 
a tendency to develop in lines of resemblance to the primal 
type, and that there was also present a tendency to develop 
such modifications of this type as would bring an organism 
into harmony with the world about it, — that is, its "environ- 
ment." 

So much having been postulated at the outset, science 
tells us that the forms of organic life, at any and every point 
in the world's history, have been shaped by the physical sur- 
roundings. The development of a plant is determined, 
among other things, by the climatic conditions under which 
it grows. The plant of the Tropic is unlike that of the 
Arctic Circle, because the " environment " has made it so. 
The feet of the modern horse are unlike those of his remote 
ancestor, because the conditions of his life are unlike those 
amid which the four-toed orohippus lived. The teeth of 
various creatures reveal the food conditions which surrounded 
them. The lungs give us the quality of the atmosphere fur- 
nished for breathing. So universal and so exact has been 
and is this correspondence between the organism and its 



1 62 The Intellectual Basis of Faith. 

environment that it has been held to furnish the most con- 
vincing proof of the work of a designing mind in the order- 
ing of the world. " See," it was said, " the wisdom and the 
goodness of God in adapting the world to the wants of living 
creatures." A whole literature of religious apologetics sets 
forth this demonstration of natural theology, and college pro- 
fessors enforce it upon their classes to this day. 

The new science, however, teaches that this correspond- 
ence between organism and environment is the work of the 
environment itself. As conditions have changed from age to 
age, organic life has been subjected to the compulsions of 
new surroundings. What the environment could not reshape 
it destroyed. The plants and animals that survived the 
great changes of the past were those that were able to 
endure such modification as would set them in harmony 
with the new order of things. This is why there were so 
few facts to mar the demonstrations of Dr. Paley and his 
school. " Dead men tell no tales." 

Man, like all his humbler relatives and neighbors, is 
included in the scope of these statements. As an animal, 
he is the resultant of his environment Granting heredity and 
adaptation, the environment must explain the special result. 
It is this, and not something different, because the environ- 
ment has been what it has been, and not otherwise. In 
other words, certain objective forces operating through vast 
periods of time have determined man to be what we see him 
to be at present. 

To illustrate : Man's lungs are what they are as the result 
of the atmosphere in which they have been developed. 
Restore to the atmosphere the carbonic acid eliminated 
during the formation of the coal measures, and man would 
at once perish. The Saurian successor of Dr. Paley would 
construct the demonstrations of his natural theology undis- 
turbed by any human protest. 



The Intellectual Basis of Fait li. 163 

Man's ear is the creation of the vibrations that convey 
sounds. Had there been no vibrations, there would have 
been no ear. Should these vibrations now cease, the ear 
would in time disappear from the organism. Renew them, 
and they would recreate the organ that should perceive them. 

The eye is the creation of the light which it now sees. 
Had there been no light, there would have been no eye. 
Shut a race of men in a sunless cavern and enable them to 
exist, and there would be seen a retrogression toward the 
brute, resulting in time in deformed and eyeless remainders 
of humanity. 

In a word, for every fact in the physical constitution of 
man, as we see him to-day, there is a corresponding creative 
fact or force in the environment, which has been for count- 
less ages operating upon him, and making him what he is. 

An orderly, classified, and duly correlated statement of 
these facts, so far as they are known, we call physical sci- 
ence. Physical science is, therefore, what men know about 
those realities, those forms of the universe that touch and 
shape man's physical nature. Men know nothing and can 
know nothing of what does not touch them. In other 
words, science originates in sensation. " Nothing in the 
mind which was not first in the senses, " said John Locke. 
"Except mind itself," added Leibnitz. And for a time it 
seemed that Leibnitz had pointed out a defect in the 
Lockian philosophy. 

There was a time, however, when the facts of nature, as 
real and as actively operative as now, were entirely unknown 
to the primeval man, who had been in a very important 
sense created by them. The stuff of the future science, 
and, so far as we can see, of the mind that was to construct 
it, was as yet in the senses. The future philosopher was 
simply a creature who felt the environment that was creating 
him. 



164 The Intellectual Basis of Faith. 

Then, as time went on, conscious mind began to look 
from the eyes that sun-eyed the scene of nature. Man, who 
had before felt, now knew that he felt. Then arose ques- 
tionings as to the origin and meaning of his various sensa- 
tions ; and man began, in a dim, tentative way, to study 
nature, trying to find out the objective fact that gave rise 
to his subjective experience. In other words, he entered 
upon a course of discovery according to the scientific 
method. Having learned by experience to postulate an 
external cause for a large number of his sensations, he 
sought to make the passage from his inner experience to a 
knowledge of this external world in which the causes of his 
sensations were located. 

An oyster lying in the shallow, sunny water felt the light, 
but knew not that he felt it, and knew not that it came from 
the glowing disk in the sky. Hence there is as yet no 
oyster theory on the subject of light, — none that I know of. 
But a man, sitting once on a sunny bank, felt the same 
vibrations that reached the oyster. He said, "/ feel the 
light." He isolated himself from the world about him. He 
said, " This is I : that is the sun." Starting from a single 
ascertained fact, he felt his uncertain and stumbling way 
across the threshold of knowledge; and there, in the vesti- 
bule of history, science was born, a bantling, weak and dim- 
eyed as the man who nursed it, but incarnating "the promise 
and potency " of the differential calculus and the Mecanique 
Celeste. Up the dim track of seonian time, the man and 
his attendant spirit have come together. Now worshipping 
it as a god, now fearing it as a devil, now consulting it for 
oracles, now exorcising it "as 'twere the fiend/' man has 
dared neither to forsake nor to follow the shape that in 
ghostly guise has seemed now his shadow and now his 
guide. Only yesterday, as it were, did man awake to the 



The Intellectual Basis of Faith. 165 

fact of his kinship with the world about him. Now he sees 
in it his physical creator, his muse, his teacher. The dead 
world lives. Evolution has not exhausted its mystery. Every 
molecule is a window that opens on a prospect toward the 
Infinite. But at last man has an introduction to his Maker, 
and walks in his thoughts in the tracks of the Almighty. 
This, then, is the story of physical science. 

1. Man's physical nature has been made to be what it is, 
rather than something different, by his environment. 

2. Man, having risen to the possibility of conscious sensa- 
tion,^// his environment, which still continues to press upon 
him. 

3. Man began to employ his thinking faculties, and by a 
process of discovery according to the scientific method made 
the passage from sensation to knowledge of the objective 
facts. 

Now, I venture to advance the opinion that the religious 
history of mankind has followed a line precisely parallel to 
this story of physical science. 

In other words, I hold that there is sufficient reason for 
believing that man's religious nature has developed under 
the controlling and shaping influence of an environment of 
spiritual facts or forces ; that, corresponding to each of the 
great, constant facts in this religious nature, there is a crea- 
tive fact or force in the environment; that but for these 
objective realities, acting upon him and creating him, no such 
" religious animal " as man has been and still is would have 
been possible. 

I hold that all real gains in religious knowledge, all ad- 
vances beyond the spiritual sensation produced in man by his 
environment of spiritual facts or forces, have been made by 
discovery and verification according to the scientific method. 

And, further, it seems to me capable of proof that the 



1 66 The Intellectual Basis of Faith. 

knowledge that men claim that they gain by "faith" or by 
"the heart" is in fact simply hypothesis which they make to 
account for certain real or supposed spiritual experiences. 
In framing such hypotheses, men stand upon the vantage- 
ground of inherited aptitudes and acquired knowledge, or 
upon the disadvantage-ground of inherited misconception 
and acquired ignorance. In either case, an application of 
proper critical tests never fails, I think, to show that "faith" 
and " the heart " furnish hypothesis as distinct from knowledge. 

To set our theory of man's religious history in terms that 
run parallel with the account that science gives of his 
physical history, it appears : — 

i. That man's religious nature has come into existence as 
the correlate of certain creative spiritual realities, and that it 
has been made to be what it is, rather than something differ- 
ent, by the facts of environment. 

2. That when man had arrived, in his development, at the 
possibility of a religious consciousness, the pressure of his 
environment awoke in him the spiritual faculty that responded 
to its suggestions. 

3. That man then began to employ his thinking powers 
upon the matter of his experiences, and by a process of dis- 
covery according to the scientific method slowly made the 
passage from what we may call spiritual sensation to what- 
ever knowledge he now has regarding the objective facts. 

Now let us give our reasons for holding these articles of 
belief. 

To begin with the first : — 

There are two possible hypotheses which may be advanced, 
in harmony with the doctrine of evolution, to explain the facts 
of man's religious history. 

First, we may suppose that the original organism from 
which man has developed was, by a designing mind, so 



The Intellectual Basis of Faith. 167 

framed that it must, under the conditions that were ordained 
for it, produce the actual facts of the world's religious history. 

Granting the correctness of this hypothesis, we have an 
explanation of history and a firm ground for religious obliga- 
tion and hope. We have also a confirmation of my position 
that for every essential fact in man's religious nature we 
have a corresponding creative fact or force in his environ- 
ment. 

The second possible hypothesis is this : We may suppose 
that the initial point of human history was the arrival some- 
how upon our planet of a germ with simply the capability of 
developing under the influence of its environment and in 
harmony with it. In that case, the development will reveal 
the nature of the forces that act upon it. Any well-defined and 
essential trait in the religious nature of man will then neces- 
sitate belief in a reality of environment correspondent to it 
and adequate to produce it ; for, by the terms of the hypoth- 
esis, the germ was simply a plastic possibility. It contained 
no element of compulsion toward either direction or result. 
The only possible explanation of direction and result must 
then be found in spiritual forces directing and shaping it. 

Let me illustrate my point. 

In waters reached by the sunlight, we find fish with eyes. 
In Mammoth Cave, we find fish without eyes. In the germ 
from which fish came there was, then, no necessity compelling 
the formation of eyes. There was in it the possibility of eyes. 
The necessity came in the sun-ray. That turned the latent 
possibility into an organic fact. Without that coming, the 
possibility would have remained unrealized ; or the coming 
of some other force might have developed this latent capa- 
bility of vision into some other entirely different manifesta- 
tion. We know, at any rate, so much as this : that eyes do 
not appear except as correlated to the objective fact of light. 



1 68 The Intellectual Basis of Faith. 

Now, I think there will be small dissent from the state- 
ment that man's religious nature is as much a distinct fact as 
his eye or his ear ; a fact, too, not to be confounded with its 
accidents. The products of this nature are as real and as 
unescapable as any building of pyramid or mountain. The 
essential elements in the ideas of God, duty, truth, right, im- 
mortality, seem as much matters of course in the order of 
nature as the secretions of bodily organs or the deposition 
of rock strata. 

These things being so, they require to be accounted for. 
No scientific account of the world can be complete that 
does not account for these ideas, and their influence in his- 
tory, fairly and adequately. 

Now, it is simply scientifically inconceivable that man 
should have become what he is, unless these results of history 
were either foreordained in the germ — in which case, essen- 
tial Theism with its logical accompaniments is granted — 
or produced by a spiritual environment, involving at least as 
much as we mean by Theism. 

That from a simple cell, without predetermined necessity 
of growth and left simply to the influence of surroundings, 
there should have come forth the actual history of hu- 
manity and the thoughts "that wander through eternity," 
while in the surroundings there were no realities corre- 
spondent to the visible results, — this were a thing to over- 
turn the very axioms of science, and make reasoning hence- 
forth impossible. The obsolete church dogma of creation 
out of nothing is "milk for babes," beside such a stupen- 
dous contradiction of reason as this. If the hypothesis of 
evolution holds good in physics, it must also hold good in 
religion. On purely scientific grounds, the religious nature 
in man demands a reason in environment just as impera- 
tively as the eye or the ear. Man has, as simple matter of 



The Intellectual Basis of Faith. 169 

fact, if his history has been such as evolution declares it has 
been, been lifted from the levels of the tiger and the ape. 
He has written the prophecies of Isaiah and the words of 
Jesus. He dreams of things that no pen has been able to 
write, and no speech can translate into the stamped cur- 
rency of religion or philosophy. The dullest churl may 
sometimes be seen turning dim eyes, that seem at once 
blinded and fascinated, toward the same ranges of infinity 
that prophet and poet have scanned with rapt faces " as they 
watch for the morning/' 

I can find no solution of all this that seems at all ade- 
quate, save that which Tennyson has put in form, as exactly 
scientific as it is beautiful : — 

" Out of darkness came the hands 
That reach through Nature, moulding men." 

Man is a result. He has been made, somehow, all of him. 
He cannot transcend his cause. The force that has shaped 
the highest in him may be harder to find than that which 
shapes his physical growth, yet none the less it must exist. 

My second proposition was that man was at first simply 
sensitive to the spiritual facts amid which his self-conscious 
life began, and that the religious faculty in him was aroused 
by the touch of the spiritual environment. 

The evidence for this may be said to be the religious 
history of mankind. 

There is no semblance of evidence for any such primeval 
revelation as men have imagined for theological purposes; 
and the notion is now given up in intelligent circles. As 
little reason is there for believing in the fancy that the prim- 
itive man had any intuitional knowledge on religious sub- 
jects. All that we see is a dim religious feeling, — an awe of 
the Unknown, — which may, I think, be most fitly described 



1 JO The Intellectual Basis of Faith. 

as the beginning of spiritual sensation ; a feeling of the envi- 
ronment that, operating upon a responsive nature, awoke in 
man the beginnings of the religious sentiment. It was the 
spiritual analogue of man's first recognition of the external 
world as something other than himself, with power to pro- 
duce sensations in him. 

I should not say it was "the heart " that felt this, though 
I do think that what is sometimes called "heart-religion " is, 
when it is not a fraud, the modern form of this original spir- 
itual sensation. People stills/the unseen; and the "faith" 
that is good, and ought to abide, is the confidence that this 
feelifig is valid evidence of an objective spiritual reality. But 
we should be careful to remember that neither the feeling nor 
the faith can be trusted in the manufacture of religious dog- 
mas. What it is that touches us, that we feel, in the reality 
of which we "have " and ought to have "faith," is a matter 
to be settled by the tests of reason, when the grounds of 
judgment are sufficiently explored. 

That man's first response to the touch of the spiritual 
environment was strictly analogous to his response to the 
touch of the physical world is, so far as we can now see, 
historic fact. He recognized simply power, which might 
help or harm him ; and he adopted such a course of action 
regarding this power as his very limited knowledge sug- 
gested. He fancied it resident in certain mysterious objects 
or in certain unexplored places. He bargained with it for 
exemption from the harm it might inflict or for the good it 
might bestow. Light and darkness were not yet divided. 
Nature and God were but phases of an unknown universe. 
He knew simply that there was an external something that 
he could not escape from, a something that beset him on 
every side, and incessantly challenged inquiry and expla- 
nation. 



The Intellectual Basis of Faith. 171 

That man has endeavored to make the passage from sensa- 
tion to knowledge is only too well known to all students of 
scientific and religious thought. How this attempt began in 
physical matters, and in what it has resulted, is recorded for 
all readers in the history of science. How it began and how 
it has proceeded in religious matters will be more clearly 
seen, when men have so conquered their prejudices as to be 
in condition to listen to the witness of facts. It is beginning 
to be seen already, and what is seen is in perfect harmony 
with the doctrine I have thus far advanced. 

Man gave something like three thousand years to making 
and trying assumptions in physics. In this way, most of 
the follies and impossibilities were tested and exploded. 

Just so it has been in religion ; though in this field prog- 
ress has been hindered by the fact that an exploded folly 
has pleased the mass of men about as well as an unexploded 
one, and rather better than a solid fact. But, in spite of 
this, a rude and tedious application of the scientific method 
has been clearing the field for the new age, in which a 
religious science shall explore for truth. Much valuable 
material has been accumulated in observed and classified 
facts concerning man and nature ; and ; looking along the 
lines of advance indicated in the results of a scientific study 
of man and the world, the conclusion seems to me no longer 
doubtful. 

How we are to make the passage from the facts of phys- 
ical science to the power which science reveals, but cannot 
see, is a problem yet unsolved. The solution, we are told, is 
inconceivable. Let us, however, remember the saying of 
Goethe, — " Man must persist in believing that the inconceiv- 
able is conceivable, or he will never make a discoverer." 

One thing is settled. The universe is not a pretence, with 
nothing in it or above it. Herbert Spencer has made an 



172 The Intellectual Basis of Faith. 

atheistic philosophy impossible. We may not be able to 
apprehend his " unknown " ; but what we cannot grasp, men 
of completer growth may be able to reach. Evolution, with 
its doctrine of growth, puts a logical quietus on dogmatism 
about the limits of discovery. 

How we shall make passage from man's nature and his- 
tory to a knowledge of the spiritual powers that have been 
and are creating him, no one may be able now to say. But 
no man is authorized by any scientific fact or law to say that 
the passage cannot be made. To the objection contained 
in the statement that we cannot deal with what lies beyond 
our experience, it is sufficient to say that all growth comes 
into contact with what was beyond the former experience. 

Meantime, it is something surely to have valid, scientific 
reason for holding to the substantial, creative verity of the 
spiritual forces that stand correlated to the spiritual nature 
and experience of mankind; to have a religious method that 
unifies the world's history and prophesies of a day when 
science shall be religious, and when religion shall be sci- 
entific. 

It remains for me to indicate briefly the bearing of this 
subject upon the question of method in religious inquiry. 

I have asserted that " faith" and "the heart," using these 
words in the sense commonly given them in religious circles, 
furnish hypothesis as distinct from knowledge. 

Tennyson grants this unreservedly, as we have seen. 
"We cannot know," is his conclusion. His "faith" is 
simply an hypothesis which he confesses himself unable to 
verify. 

But this conclusion of the great poet is by no means the 
favorite one in ordinary religious circles. Things visible 
and invisible, things impossible and things inconceivable, are 
there known "by faith" ; and very frequently men's "hearts" 



The Intellectual Basis of Faith, 173 

tell them things that no sanely intelligent man would care to 
be held responsible for in a court of justice, or in the court 
of history ; and all this without the troublesome processes of 
inquiry and verification. 

But even these foolish and harmful excesses of religion 
bear most impressive though indirect witness to the truth of 
my positions. 

That there should be a very persistent and controlling 
religious belief among men who know nothing about the 
scientific method, or any other method of thinking or investi- 
gation, is precisely what we should expect, if the doctrines 
I have advanced are correct. Human nature, having been 
made what it is by the environing realities with which 
religion has to do, should of course be responsive toward 
those realities. Among men of untrained minds, hypothesis 
and assumption stand as substitutes for knowledge on all 
the more mysterious questions. This is specially true in 
religion. All men can /#?/ here ; but only a few are capable 
of subjecting feeling to a critical analysis, and finding the 
fact revealed in it. The common element in human expe- 
rience is the belief in an objective ground of spiritual sensa- 
tion. This belief has become, in a sort, a second nature. 
The form under which the individual conceives these unseen 
powers to exist and act upon him is determined by the gen- 
eral thought of his age. Belief abides because of inherited 
habit and personal experience. Tennyson has put the com- 
mon form of religious demonstration in his verse : — 

" If e'er, when faith had fallen asleep, 
I heard a voice, ' Believe no more,' 
And heard an ever-breaking shore 
That tumbled in the Godless deep ; 

" A warmth within the breast would melt 

The freezing reason's colder part, 

And like a man in wrath the heart 

Stood up and answered, ( / have felt? " 



174 The Intellectual Basis of Faith. 

The fact that this is the answer of mankind as a whole to 
the voice that says, " Believe no more," bears eloquent wit- 
ness to the divine elements in the working forces of the 
universe ; but that is a fatally defective philosophy of human 
life that has no other answer than this to give, when put to 
the question by the modern Zeit-Geist. If this is all, then 
religion not only begins in feeling, but there ends. The lib- 
erty to indulge in a decorous emotion when the feeling is 
stronger than usual is all that she can ask or receive. By 
no possibility can any firm ground of reason be found in the 
chaos of " worlds unrealized." By no divine astronomy can 
the fixed lights of truth be distinguished from the tapers that 
glimmer in fogs of tradition that overhang the labyrinthine 
ways of metaphysical theology, or from the ignes fatui that 
lure the multitude into the bottomless bogs of superstition. 
Religion must take refuge in the cell of the monkish tradi- 
tioner, in the ecstasy of the mystic, or sit with the rapt poet, 
far from the common life of men, above the clouds that shut 
its turmoil from the sight of heaven. 

Here and there, one abiding in the lofty calm of contem- 
plation may say to the questions that follow to vex him, — 

Here " in my spirit I will dwell, 

And dream my dream, and hold it true." 

But, in the great world of action, ignorant enthusiasm will 
shame religion by its excesses, and culture will leave "faith" 
to fools. 

The verse of Tennyson, like much religious philosophizing, 
illustrates the too common tendency to give a very inadequate 
reason for most excellent behavior. There are far better 
grounds than he alleges for refusing to be an atheist. The 
man Tennyson himself stands as an adequate and unanswer- 
able scientific rejoinder to the sceptic Tennyson's " freezing 
reason." Science, taking his own " In Memoriam " and 



The Intellectual Basis of Faith. 175 

planting itself on the ground of Darwinism, may safely abide 
the severest tests of fair investigation. That poem is as 
real as the solar system. Its religious aspiration, longing, 
and faith must have a ground in facts of the universe. As 
well believe the great star Alcyone to be but a fancy born of 
some cheating trick of the optic nerve as believe that a star- 
like thought, shining in the infinite empyrean of the soul, is 
but the glint of two clashing atoms in the brain of a man 
who does not know enough to locate the flash, as he should, 
in the gray matter of the cerebrum. 

But if the poem refutes the carpenter-philosophy of the 
system-builders who potter in attempts to construct a uni- 
verse that shall stand firmly on nothing, if it defies the 
chemistry of experimenters who think to extract sunbeams 
from fungus growths that never saw the light, what shall we 
say of the poet himself ? 

The grandest glow of poesy that ever belted the spiritual 
heavens with its galaxy of " words that burn " is less wonder- 
ful than is many a soul that walks the common round of duty 
here on the earth. Whence these spirits that enshrine the 
awful beauty that enthrones itself in the worship of the ages, 
spirits from w r hose altitudes one looks with almost level eye 
upon the fixed lights of Eternal Truth ? Not accidents : 
there are no accidents. Not freaks of nature, fountains 
that leap above their source. Science knows nothing of 
things like these. And, unless science is one stupendous 
mistake, and its doctrine of evolution a denial of Cause, 
we are brought into the presence of environing realities, 
so transcendent that the intellect in its loftiest mood must 
stand abashed before the majesty 

" Of Something felt, like something here, 
Of Something done, it knows not where, 
Such as no language can declare." 



176 The Intellectual Basis of Faith. 

Taking these facts of man's nature and history, let Re- 
ligion quit her abject attitude of apology and her futile 
iteration of creeds outworn. Let her come fearlessly forth 
from the cell of a "faith" that cannot "know." Her facts 
are as real as the facts of geology. Her fear to trust them 
and build upon them raises the suspicion that her " faith " 
has damaged its eyes by long musing in the dark, or that 
she cares more for the safety of catechisms than for the real 
truth. By adopting the method of science, she may rid her- 
self of the impediments of error, attest the enduring validity 
of the divine elements of her experience, and open the way 
to grounding her hopes on discovered and demonstrated 
reality. 

By such a course, Religion will take her rightful place as 
queen of the sciences. She will have a method, and be able 
to make good her claim. She will stand hopefully fronting 
the future, her feet planted on the solid facts of the universe. 
She will have left to her all that is worth preserving from 
the things that have been supposed to rest on grounds of 
supernatural revelation or of intuition ; and will have be- 
sides the very great comfort of being able to give a reason 
for continuing to believe them. Reason and reverence will 
stand together at her altars ; and to the litany of their wor- 
ship all the people will say, " Amen ! " 



*A VERITABLE HAND-BOOK OF NOBLE LIVING." 



THE DUTIES OP WOMEN. 

A COURSE OF LECTURES 
By FRANCES POWER COBBE. 



CRITICAL NOTICES. 
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insight, and wish that it might be read and pondered by both conservative and 
radical women. The former might learn the relation of freedom to duty, and the 
latter may well consider the perils which surround each onward step. . . . Miss 
Cobbe might have called her book 'Old Duties in New Lights.' It must help 
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" The best of all books on 'Women's Duties.' Now that George Eliot is gone, 
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Fourth Edition. Cloth. 12mo. $1.00. 
New Cheap Edition. Paper. 25 cents. 



For sale by booksellers, and mailed, postpaid, on receipt of the price, by 

Geo. H. Ellis, Publisher, Boston. 



INSTITUTE ESSAYS: 

READ BEFORE THE " MINISTERS' INSTITUTE," PROVI- 
DENCE, R«I«, OCTOBER, 1879. 

CONTENTS : 

Introduction Rev. H. W. Bellows. 

Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, Rev. S. R. Calthrop. 

The Relation of Modern Philosophy to Lib- 
eralism, Prof. C. C. Everett. 

Influence of Philosophy upon Christianity, F. E. Abbot. 

Monotheism and the Jews, Dr. Gustav Gottheil 

The Idea of God Rev. J. W. Chadwick. 

.The Authorship of the Fourth Gospel, . . . Prof. Ezra Abbot. 

The Gospel of John, Rev. Francis Tiffany. 

Methods of Dealing with Social Questions, Rev. J. B. Harrison. 

Ethical Law and Social Order, Rev. Geo. Batchelor. 

" To the reader of comparative theologies, this book has a special interest."— 
Zion's Herald. 

" The publication of this volume is one of the great tide-marks of theological 
progress in the United States."— Free Religious Index. 

"Of all the compilations to which Unitarian discussions have given rise, this 
will be found the most solid and meaty."— Christian Register. 

" The cause of Unitarianism will have to take care of itself ; but it is a matter 
of great public importance when clergymen, however stationed in practical life, 
address themselves without reserve and without qualification to the ascertain 
ment of philosophic truth. How well this has been done at the Providence 
meeting of the ' Institute' is shown by this volume, which is entitled to the cor- 
dial attention not only of students of theology, but also of those interested in 
high truth. Those who know enough, and those whose religious system has 1 >een 
completed, had better not approach a volume which, to a seeker after fa * *s 
wonderfully grateful and stiniu'ating."— Boston Advertiser. 

8vo, 280 pp. Cloth, $1.25; paper, $1.00. 



THREE PHASES OF MODERN THEOLOv 

CALVINISM, UNITARIANISM, LIBERALISM. 



By JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN, A.M., 

LECTURER ON ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY. 

" The addresses rest throughout on Christian theism, the ethical spirit, the 

'— as 
as 



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temperate soul, vast reading, and good judgment. They are singularly dispas 
sionate and well balanced, and good readers will find them healthful as well 



stimulating and helpful."— Boston Advertiser. 
8vo, 68 pp. Paper. Price 35 cents. 



THE MINISTER'S HAND-BOOK, 

FOR CHRISTENINGS, WEDDINGS, AND FUNERALS. 

COMPILED AND ARRANGED 

By Rev. MINOT J. SAVAGE. 

This little volume contains a service for the baptism of children, several forms 
of marriage service, and a variety of burial services, with a number of selections 
in prose and poetry suitable for use at funerals. At the end of the book are a 
dozen blank pages, for such additions as individual taste may indicate. It is well 
printed in clear, large type, and put up in neat, flexible binding, ite size and shape 
being arranged especially for the pocket. 

Flexible cloth, 75 cents; full Turkey morocco, gilt edges, stamped 
with owner's name in gold, $2. 50. 

For sale by booksellers, or sent by mail by 
Geo. H. Ellis, Publisher, 141 Franklin Street, Boston. 







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